You may think it’s all in your head because you’re getting older. Maybe you think the world really isn’t getting noisier, louder and filled with more distractions. Maybe you think it’s just your imagination.
And maybe it is your imagination. But I know for sure it isn’t my imagination.
Science will someday prove what I already know: loud intrusive music causes brain warts and reductions in IQ levels.
I will then be recognized as a visionary rather than just another silly crank and my remains, stored in a janitor’s closet at Eversole Mortuary, will be borne to a more fitting and noble resting place: the Eversole Mortuary bingo and pinball parlor.
My insights that loud, terrible music causes harm to lab mice and teenagers are earned through years of hard experience. I spent the 1970s in a rock ‘n’ roll coma and look how stupid I got.
Intrusive noise is everywhere and cannot be avoided no matter where we hurry, scurry and duck, no matter our earmuffs, earplugs and cotton balls.
Have you seen one of those new gas station pumps that talks to you while you watch the digital dial whizzing its way through your dollars by the tens, and I don’t mean dimes?
I’ve not yet had the pleasure of cleaning my windshield while an automated voice tells me about a fresh ‘n’ scrubby new additive that cleans my engine while it curbs global warming. I can’t wait. Hopefully these new talking pumps allow our ever-more-diverse citizenry to choose among an array of languages. I’ll pick German just to make sure the experience is as unpleasant as possible.
The metastasizing audio menace creeps on, as it has and will. In the semi-dumpy North Carolina town I’ve been camping out in for three years it’s been decided that pushing volume-enriched music through speakers mounted on street poles is a public service.
Most of what spews out is “classic rock” as if it’s my fault for allowing the Eagles to get popular, with the remainder being hostile rap chants, as if it’s my fault I got old. Whatever. The result? A nice walk ruined, and another reason to sell my hearing aid on eBay.
I don’t know what to think or who to blame. All we can be sure of is that they aren’t finished yet. Ours was the last generation that hadn’t been bombarded since birth with exhausting music, and so we have (dimming) memories of quiet places.
Restaurants, minus the tinkling of silverware and the rattling of ice cubes in cocktail glasses, once were as quiet as banks, which were as quiet as mortuaries, which were as quiet as libraries. Downscale restaurants that permitted teenagers to congregate were a noisy exception because jukeboxes accompanied teens.
But restaurants today have gone from allowing pianists to play Moon River in the lobby to having a flatscreen TV bursting with seasonal sports of interest to no one unless it’s a sports bar, and sports bars don’t have “a” flatscreen TV, they’ve got dozens of them.
I remember when grocery stores began playing Muzak, a synthetic breed of smooth pastel songs played softly and barely noticeable. Now a supermarket is a nonstop collage of in-house advertising specials and demented music recorded with the sole purpose of making you think you better get back to Aisle Seven for a few more Pepsi Colas and PopTarts.
At a local car dealership I visited a few weeks ago the service department was booming with echoing blasts of audio sludge that would have had me throwing wrenches if I’d worked there.
I once checked into a motel and when I got to my room the TV was already on.
SFO has thousands of screens tuned to a soccer game narrated by an excitable fellow no one is listening to. Macy’s department store in Santa Rosa has countless screens featuring scowling models dancing intricate steps to offensive lyrics interspersed with punching bag thumps.
At baseball games decibel levels never dip below 50. Between innings, between at-bats and between pitches we are bludgeoned by horns, shouts, screams and if time permits, the brief mention of a pinch-hitter. If you leave your seat to fetch a drink or a dog or use the bathroom there’s a TV every 15 feet so you don’t miss any advertising you came to the ballpark to avoid.
How about your doctor’s office? Once a hushed sanctuary, medical facilities now play endless reels of infomercials masquerading as medical advice (“10 Tips to a Healthier You!!”). The yammering is a distraction when filling out the questionnaire while trying to fudge on questions about your drug and alcohol consumption.
Yet there’s hope. A recent study published in the New England Journal of Quack Medicine reports a promising new treatment called Ice-Pick-to-Eardrum-Therapy that could yield permanent relief from ambient environmental audio assaults.
Tom Hine is presently in North Carolina where the sounds of silence are mostly missing. TWK is not much more than an inflatable doll and thus untouched by worldly troubles.
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