This is an excerpt from my upcoming book Dear Charlotte, which tells the winding story of the triumph and folly of forever trying to better yourself. This letter is from the chapter on "The Pursuit of Happiness."
Hi Charlotte,
I've been taking some interesting walks throughout this city. The other day, I walked up and down the hills south of Chevy Chase Dr., and as usual, my mind was free-associating like crazy. I have a way of guessing when a city had it's boom based on the prevalent architecture. The homes I saw had carports and plasticy-looking white-painted walls, which clearly indicated having been built during the 1950s-1960s Hollywood era. I imagined that the support network for the movie industry lived out here. Cameramen and production assistants must have lived out in the hills while working on sets for Marlon Brando. Now they are all retired and rich because their property values have increased twenty-fold since then.
But the darkside of these curious digressions is that I get completely exhausted and distracted by a lot of other things. I obsess about little arguments I have with people. I start forming and discarding, forming and discarding, business plans for the apps I want to create. My mind gets into monotonous, repetitive loops that drone on for hours.
So I Googled, "How to stop over-thinking," and I came upon the suggestion to overwhelm your senses with external stimuli. Then I remembered how much I liked listening to radio stations that play eclectic music. There's certain stations, like Radio Paradise, that have the most perfect song lists. Eclectic music is tricky, because you can easily overwhelm listeners with too much novelty. If done right though, you can listen to these stations all day, living in the sweet spot in between dullness and over-stimulation.
So I bookmarked a few stations on my iPhone, and set all my car radios and stereos to them as well. Now I'm drenched in a total wall of sound. It's enough stimulation to take me out of my thoughts, but not enough to completely zap my ability to think. That's the problem I had with talk radio. I could only listen to it in bursts, because eventually there'd be something I needed to think about.
So on my walk this morning, I turned on the radio and listened to some pleasant new post-punk song. I had no worries about myself nor about what I was going to do next. Instead, I was left with the pleasant daydreams about classic movie stars walking about, shining in the California sun.1
1 Unfortunately, this method lasted for only a couple weeks.
