This Thing I Do

I ruminate. I sit in an empty room and talk. Not to myself but by myself. Not to any particular person always but sometimes. The person is not there, generally. If the person is there, his or her responses mostly serve to distract me from my ruminations. They rarely affect my thinking or what I have to say. So, why all the verbiage? Why the chewing and tossing, if not to hash out a semblance of agreement with another mind? Perhaps, I suggest to myself, it is because my own thoughts conflict with one another. I am ambivalent. Not neutral, mind you—ambivalent. Or, as one of my brothers once suggested, “I am bivalent”. I have two valences—one positive, the other negative. On any given topic, the positive voice argues with the negative and vice versa. Do they ever reach a consensus? Generally, they do. That’s the point. This, apparently, is how I think things over. I argue with myself—aloud. It drives my wife nuts. Especially when she is trying to sleep or to concentrate on some problem she is trying to solve. She will walk into whatever room I am in, turn on the light (because, finding visual stimulation distracting, I often prefer to ruminate in darkness) and announce that I have awakened her yet again from a most profound slumber. “I was just about to find out the answer to my dream and you blew it for me again!” I’m devastated every time she says that. No, really. I am. I don’t do this to drive Suzanne crazy. I don’t want her to be crazy. Our son deserves to have at least one sane parent and the jury’s still out on whether that might be me. I just can’t help myself. This is how I function. Moreover, I don’t seem to be able to function unless I do this thing I do.