Sitting in my workroom at home over the last few months I've been made extremely uncomfortable by what SOUNDS like a child crying. It's not a violent noise but it's sheer repetiveness is very disturbing.
I brought it up with Catherine. She knows the family in the block next door, and we've had them over before. They're sweet but their circumstances are rather tragic. The grandmother looks after two children because their mother is a smack addict. Catherine says that the little girl Jamie cries a lot. I've always thought expecting grandparents to bring children up is very cruel. Somewhere I have a rhyme in the back of my head, maybe one of Chuck D's, of how the stress of child-rearing can drive the elderly insane. Jamie once had a bruise on her face, and I (almost certainly innacurately and unfairly) lept to the assumption that she'd been hit.
Today I've had to lug my Mac to an office nearby to do some motion-graphics jiggery-pokery for them. It's been a hard and tedious start to the job, cleaning up mattes which have been blue-screened poorly at 25 frames/second. I started to notice the same noise. This half-mew/half-wail just at the edge of my hearing's threshold. It occured to me that the sound must be issuing from my Mac, the hard drive spinning down or perhaps the processor cycling, but to be honest I'm not at all sure. The really naseating feeling is that it might might be some kind of sonic hallucination, some liminal cry from the universal unconscious. Nuts, I know.
Posted by Woebot at June 23, 2004 09:31 AM