Noise

It’s getting hard to think, the noise is so loud. Trucks, booming bass on car stereos, sirens, unmuffled motorcycles, construction, garbage collectors, leaf-blowers and chainsaws, low-flying airplanes and traffic helicopters, a deafening and unsavory audile cornucopia that makes our days just a bit more stressful and angry, fills the air and drowns out nature. In most urban and suburban settings, we’re surrounded, enveloped, shot through and through with noise and realistically, there’s very little we can do about it. We’re at the mercy of others, be they individuals or corporate. The sale of earplugs and other protective devices, according to the Hearing Loss Association, has tripled in the last 10 years.

The noise isn’t just outdoors. When was the last time you went to an inexpensive or fast food restaurant where you could hear yourself, or carry on an adult conversation? At a such a place with friends recently, I asked if they could remember eating quietly and unhurried, and why, nowadays, the head-banging Muzac is turned to 10? One opinion is that most establishments want the customers to consume and leave. That makes sense, since restaurants thrive on high client turnover. Another (my friend Lisa’s who often reasonable) is that most dining experience will be enhanced if you don’t have to talk to the person you’re with. A third theory was that people in their 40s and younger now filter out noise almost instinctively. I wondered if they’re simply gone deaf.

At any rate, this partially explains the desire of so many iPod users to design their own noises and meet their private needs. I had always thought that, starting with the ubiquitous Sony Walkman, ear-phones and listening devices were a conscious ‘screw you’ to the rest of the world, a somewhat discreet display of asociality. Now I am beginning to understand that I need to fight back.

I just bought a pair of Bose sound-deadening earphones. I am scheming with a neighbor to put up “Quiet—Hospital Zone” signs on my street, and I have installed an air-horn on my Jeep. The latter I will use strictly for vengeance, such as when stuck in traffic behind a dump-truck.