The Zen Bell (This must a metaphor for something)

So here I am-- back in the bedroom of my childhood. Its now a second office, primarily for keeping the computer equipment organized (natch). Like shadows, tape marks remind me of where I had movie posters for Pale Rider and Shane (yes, I know they are essentially the same movie). Odd things remain: my TMBG concert poster from the Apollo 18 tour, my Newky Brown Bar mirror from Notty, and the Zen Bell fulcrum.

When I was 14, I purchased a princess phone at a garage sale for a quarter. I took it apart and had fun running different volatage currents of electricty through their various different parts, mostly to make the ringer ring. Eventually, I got bored with this and tied one of the bells to about three feet of string and hung it from my ceiling. I labeled the fulcrum point for this pendulum "Zen Bell" I was actually thinking about the final stage of Street Fighter 2 where you get killed by M. Bison (unless you are Blanca in which case you just electrocute him to death and watch the dumbest of the end cinematics, but I digress). I actually found this thing to be an astoundingly useful stress reliever.

Most stress relievers have you beat the living crude out of something squishy. This was just the opposite. I kept a variety of hammers on my desk and the point was to hit only the bell, not the string, not myself, not a bookshelf, and not to whiff and hit nothing. After various experimentation, it turns out that the most satisfying experience was to casually tap the bell once with a ball peen hammer. The bell would sing for about thirty seconds. The noise was pretty loud... loud enough and sustained enough to make you both (1) forget why it was you wanted to hit the bell in the first place and (2) admit that greater than whatever stress made you hit the bell, the sense of curiousity as to what would happen was a bigger reason for doing it. As the dog days of summer before going off to Rice set in, I would also think about that scene in the Magicians Nephew where the bell actually awakens the Witch of the dead world.

Now there is no bell, no hammers, no string, only the label and the space where the bell once hung in a different time. I look at the space and hit the bell with my imagination and the sound travels out of the past and rings in my ears.