I didn’t sleep well that night or the next, nor on the plane home. I bought new earplugs at the airport upon arrival, but they were incompatible with my tight canals. Packing in a hurry for a work trip to Albuquerque this past spring, I forgot my baby white noise machine, my little ear plugs, the ear buds I exercise with, and the charger for my noise-canceling headphones, which crapped out midway through the flight. Then human error abruptly forced me from my sound cocoon. I would place it next to my tea while I ate my breakfast and fire it up when garbage collectors came, when my new upstairs neighbor-this one a penitent law student, mercifully-was clip-clopping around, and when the leaf blower at the church across the street started a-blowing. I obtained a small portable white noise machine meant for babies and toted it around my apartment like a daemon. They had even entered my person, in the form of the special narrow earplugs I bought for my dainty ear canals. Noise-canceling devices had proliferated and taken over my home. The sensation was akin to sleeping in a dryer, encircled by womb-like whirring. With the ceiling fan on, I slept surrounded by sound on all sides. I then put a LectroFan white noise machine on the right side. I bought a loud air purifier and put it on the left side of my bed. The craftswoman moved out my devices stayed. She, perhaps more so than the virus itself, became the locus of my pandemic stress. The floor that separated me from my neighbor’s workshop was completely uninsulated, and the wail of her equipment felt like a personal test. The unpredictability and pitch of the noises made them impossible to ignore. The woman who lived above me in our quadplex also rented the garages below to run a business making minimalist metal wall hangings, a task that involved a fair amount of what sounded like welding. The problem was that there was nowhere to politely remove myself to. But during lockdown, my ambient fussiness grew to a fixation. I don’t mind overhearing people talking, but I recoil from other instruments in the disgusting opera of everyday life: open-mouthed chewing, rhythmic sniffing or coughing, phone alerts, pen-clicking, nail-clipping.įor a long time, I was able to tune these sounds out, or politely remove myself from situations where they were bothering me.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |