Conflicting Noise

The older I get, the less tolerant I am of conflicting noise. This is problematic, because we live in a very noisy world.

It’s not that I dislike sound. I love music. As a little baby child, I was drawn to musical toys–xylophones, pianos, drums, plastic harmonicas, kazoos, whistles, anything that could make some semblance of music. I’m sure my parents were very happy about this. When I was nine and handed a for-real flute and given lessons, I practiced so much it irritated the rest of my family.

I love music so much, I birthed two musicians. One of my children got a master’s degree in the subject, and the other regularly gets strangers pay to hear her play in clubs and bars. I love music so much that when I hear it, that’s all I can hear, especially if there are lyrics.

I’m talking to you, every restaurant and bar everywhere. Yeah you, with your soundtrack as loud as or maybe a little bit louder than the voice of the person talking next to me. My brain just scrambles. It strains to hear the human conversation but it’s drawn to the music. As a result, it focuses on neither, and I get snippets of information spiked with power chords.

Add a margarita to the mix? I’m completely useless as a conversational partner.

Same in the car, same in the living room. I know it makes me sound curmudgeonly, but I’m old enough to shake my fist at the clouds whenever I feel like it. Either we’re talking OR we’re listening to music, not both. Either we’re talking OR we’re watching TV, not both, I simply can’t do it.

And the more I try, the more my battery drains. It’s like a cell phone trying to find a signal in the middle of nowhere. During a thunderstorm. Near an electromagnet. While there are sun flares.

If I go out to dinner with a group of people and I’m seated in the middle of the table, and there are two conversations going on, one on either side of me, I’m lost. I can’t focus on either one of them. Unless I physically turn my back to one and make a concerted effort to block out certain voices, I can’t distinguish any of the words. Unless, of course, someone says my name, which my brain is somehow attuned to. This is not ego, this is paranoia. Which, I guess, is a form of ego, since my brain assumes that someone somewhere will be thinking about me enough to make me the topic of a sentence, even if it’s a mean one. Or one that is appointing me to some kind of task I don’t want to be doing.

Conferences, no matter how informative or enjoyable, with their sun-up to sun-down expectations of crowded rooms and chatter require at least a day of recovery after the fact. Preferably a week. Which, of course, I don’t get because I have to come back to regular life with twenty people yammering at me at the same time that there were something like three whole days where they couldn’t talk to me.

So when I’m finished using every scrap of energy in my body trying to follow a conversation in a room with chaotic noise and I go home, all I can do is stare into the void. I can handle the quiet rhythmic pattern of knit purl knit knit purl and not much more.

This must be a me thing, I get it. Otherwise, someone would have rearranged things by now. There’d be no loud soundtracks in restaurants. There’d be naptimes built into conferences and smaller tables at lunch.

The noise, the sound, the music, the conversation, would all be one at a time.

Buy my book, Devil’s Defense, or the audiobook, order the sequel, Devil’s Hand, and/or find me on Substack.