Knackered Can’t Filter with Benzos

   Hey there, Knackered here.  When we were growing up, my parents were church goers.  To keep peace in the family and not being trusted to stay home alone, we religiously (pun intended) went along.

   Classes met by age level for half an hour and then all age levels met for the remainder of the time in ‘children’s church’.  There was no escape until we were let out to meet our parents after church let out.

   Amid the Bible lessons and shenanigans going on with a room full of squirming kids, we sang songs. One of the first we learned was  ‘In my heart there rings a melody, rings a melody, of love.’  None of us knew anything about love, but the words stuck through the years.  I never heard any ringing anywhere and my cardiologist told me recently that my heart should be good until my next check up in six months.  No guarantees of course.

  With my heart still able to filter and pump blood, I wish the same could be said for my head space.  Lately it seems like there’s a cage full of monkeys up there doing their shenanigans.  Fortunately, the ringing has stopped for the time being.

   There’s supposed to be a filtering process up there that allows us to focus on one thing at a time, no matter how much extraneous stimuli is pounding its way in from our surroundings.

   To get scientific about all this, it even has a name: ‘sensory gating.’  To get even more scientific, it’s a neural process of filtering out irrelevant stimuli from all  the environmental junk reaching the brain.  When it works, it’s supposed to prevent information centers from being overloaded and provide selective attention.

   I’ve long suspected that (in plain language) I ain’t got much of that going on upstairs.  Now that we’re all immersed in the Benzo mess, it seems as though what little filtering was going on before has now pretty much gone on holiday.

   Case in point:  While at the grocery store this morning (geez, I hate going out)

I suddenly realized that I couldn’t really figure out where  I was or what was going on around me.  Granted, Neil Diamond, singing to Caroline, was coming in from one direction, a mother admonishing her toddler in pajamas entered from another, all the while I was trying to read the shopping list and talk to my wife about frozen pizzas.  Just. Could. Not. Compute.

   I highly suspect that my neuro transmitters that control the sieve in my head that’s supposed to sort this all out, have been fried.  And what do you suppose was the culprit in all of this?

   Yes, I know we can’t blame the Benzos for everything.  Health problems should be checked out by a professional. And while there wasn’t any ringing in my heart, there was a cacophony of sounds wailing in my head. Using plain language again: you could say that I don’t got no filtering left no how.

   To quote Konrad Adenauer, German Chancellor and founder of the Christian Democratic Party, “God designed the stomach to eject what is bad for it, but not the human brain.”