Herb

         There is a person living in my brain. A full-fledged person, just really small, with legs, arms, hands, a head, and most of all a mouth. It's infuriating! In the morning, even before I wake up, the little creep calls the committee to order in the eight-inch space between my ears and starts talking. I haven't even opened my eyes. Then at night he starts in again, yammering away as I'm trying desperately to fall asleep. On and on he goes until finally The Great God Morpheus floods my neurons with enough magical melatonin that I stop hearing his voice and dwell in the land of Nod.

         If the voice—I've come to call him Herb—isn't babbling himself, he choreographs other conversations and rigamarole in my exhausted cortex. One night last week for instance, as I'm trying to doze off, he started up this madcap, high-speed Olympic-level badminton game across my corpus callosum. On one side was the plumber, due at our house in the morning. I was shaking my finger in his face, rehearsing over and over like a broken record the conversation I would have with him about the odor he still hadn't figured out coming out of the kitchen sink.

         Herb was refereeing, calling shots, fouls, changing sides, grabbing birdies, and generally disrupting everything. On the other side of the net in a Looney Tunes version of someone's backyard, were three people I'd never seen before arguing about an umbrella and a picnic table—I guess for a garden party to which I was invited, despite being dressed in skivvies and a baseball cap that said "Go Hawks!"

         In the background droned an earworm: Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, Dick Van Dyke in unforgettable full voice, on and on and on.

         Herb directed this mishmash of goings-on phantasmagorical, Mephisto-like, making even less sense than a T. S. Eliot poem—to no end it seems, other than sowing confusion and disarray in my tired, got-to-get-some-sleep brain.

         "Shut the fuck up!" I yelled, scaring the hell out of my sound asleep wife.

         "You out of meds?" she grumbled.

         I staggered to the medicine cabinet and shook out the two remaining Tylenol PMs, the only drug I take these days. (I wouldn't have spilled water down my PJs if I'd opened my eyes, but there you go.)

         William Faulkner said, in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech, "when the last dingdong of doom has clanged and faded from the last worthless rock hanging tideless in the last red and dying evening, that even then there will still be one more sound: that of [man's] puny inexhaustible voice, still talking." [Emphasis mine.]

         QED.

         This brain thing had been going on for months. I was at the point of getting a gun and blowing the little bastard away. But that would’ve defeated the purpose, I reckon. Then I hit upon a solution, a way to, well, silence Herb.

         I turned on the nightstand light and opened a book. A long one, and not a who-dun-it or a thriller. I started with Vanity Fair, the book not the magazine. Thackeray and sad little Amelia and crafty Becky took me back to Olde London—bridges, carriages, Napoleon.  It worked! The next thing I knew, it was morning, the book about to slide off my chest. Next, Dostoevsky, or anything by Henry James.

         But what about mornings, you ask? Aren’t they still there, the pre-dawn committee mumbling, chairs scraping, throat-clearing, Magic Marker starting to squeak on the whiteboard? The answer shouldn’t surprise you: Coffee! Java! The Blessed Bean! Mud! I can tell you that sure as Dracula hates sunlight, the folks in my head and their bossy leader can't handle the fact that I get out of bed, don my fur-lined mocs, and make myself a cuppa. I pull open the drapes, sit on the sofa, watch the rising sun through the trees and the chickadees at the feeder. Old Herb slaps the table in frustration, pockets his felt-tip pen, and the committee adjourns. I sneak back to bed in peace and grab some extra winks.

         It's been a week now. You-know-who still gives it a try every so often. I advise him to give it up. Get help or something. Find a program. Find someone else's head to torment.

         And for God's sake, man, get some rest!