Life is noisy. I get that. I mean, the tinnitus I’ve been blessed with is constant. I blame my brother. While listening to a Top-40 AM radio station in 1975, he burst into my room like a man on a mission. “Why the hell are you listening to that crap?” he said while lunging for my cheap third-hand radio.
He clicked it over to FM and dialed in a rock and roll station. The music that played wasn’t called “classic rock” yet. It was only “rock” at that time. That same bunch of s**t is still being played today, fifty years later.
Something happened years ago that killed that genre of music. Rock and Roll was moving along selling discs and concert tickets. Making tons of money until Woodstock ‘99. Korn and Limp Bizkit turned that place into something out of Lord Of The Flies and scared the s**t out of show business. The once brave and rebellious program directors gave in to the terrified squealing of the lawyers and marketing executives at MTV. Radio stations changed overnight. Now we’re left with the compromised and neutered version. No fun aloud.
Seems like everything in America has its own goddamn soundtrack. Can’t get into a car without setting off bells and buzzers reminding me to lock this and buckle that. The computer that runs the production thinks people are too stupid to know that opening the door and falling out on the freeway is a bad move. And if anybody does do that then they should get what’s coming to them. Hell, it would most likely get caught on a dashcam and make whomever owns it a million-click influencer millionaire.
Get on a screen to watch something and get inundated with commercials on a platform we pay a subscription to watch. What the hell is the deal with that? We’re paying to get sold to.
Only in America!
The aforesaid commercials are twenty decibels louder than whatever show we’re attempting to watch. I gotta sit there with the remote to either toggle the volume to make it level or mute it altogether. They are visual atrocities designed to be so aggressive that they burrow directly into the reptilian core of your brain, overriding your higher purpose in an attempt to sap and impurify all of our precious bodily fluids.
Call them what they are. Federally-mandated thought-crimes that have been rebranded as “disruptive marketing,” selling us some plastic-coated, digitized interface we don’t need, like so-called smart toasters. I refuse to buy whatever it is advertised in those damn commercials, even if whatever they’re selling is in my best interest. That’ll teach those marketing a******s.
And then there’s cell phones. We no longer have a “silent majority” in this country. We have a “beeping majority” that reflexively reaches for their pocket like they’re being frisked by a TSA agent with a groping fetish every time the phone vibrates and chirps.
There is the noise our brains constantly burp when we try to mediate and shut it all out. You want some peace and quiet, but your thoughts keep regurgitating the last thing you’ve heard. It’s like your brain is hosting a one-man, 24-hour cable opinion show. The noise in your head is the subliminal amplified drone of Congress, a body of people whose only discernible purpose is to make noise to distract you so that you don’t notice them taking away all your cash or some b******t like that.
There’s no getting away from it.
You try to take a vacation and the noise seems to double because money talks! Between the planes or cars and hotels, you can’t relax for a minute because all you can think about is how goddamn expensive everything is.
Don’t tell me “It’s not about the money.” It’s always about the money. Everything we do is all about the money. If you don’t have any money, you are plotting how to get money, and if you have the money, you’re always thinking about how someone is going to screw you out of the money.
It’s the perpetual, high-frequency whine of the system itself. The electronic clatter of algorithms trading billions of dollars, the perpetual scream from an adviser trying to upsell you on an adjustable-rate mortgage, or the hollow clang of your retirement fund losing half its value because some Wall Street jackass invented a derivative backed by another jackass that only makes money by managing more money.
I know it’s a losing battle when the quietest place on Earth is so silent you can hear yourself blinking. The place was built by Microsoft, of course, because if something that drives people nuts it has to be built by a multi-national behemoth. That way their other subsidiaries can provide a solution to a problem they created.
So, f**k it. Silencers on guns don’t really silence them. Noise cancelling headphones don’t really cancel all the noise. Put on some classic rock and roll and crank it up to eleven. Play it so loud that your now much older brother will show up and yell at you to “Turn that crap down!”
Hey! You’ve made it to the end. Thanks for that!
Check out my detective novel, The Lying Spiral
This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit craigtysonadams.substack.com
