Ear Waxed

I’m going to be honest, I don’t know much about science or anatomy but I do know a fair amount about the ear, or to be more specific, my ear. I don’t much care for loud noises, heavy metal, hardcore punk rock, vacuum cleaners, cuisinarts, when growing up in Southern California, the favorite pastime of teenage ne’erdowells was driving around in a small car with big speakers and driving the passengers to the brink of decibel threshold. I was the backseat driver, yelling for the volume to be turned down. I was the guy who called shotgun and upon planting myself in the front seat, carefully turned the knob down a few clicks to the dismay of the rest of the car.

But I like what I like, the rhythmic hum of drum beats, the careful drone of the voice of urban youth poetically bounding off the walls of selectively cropped samples, the din of a grainy guitar keeping pace with the bounding wooden sticks on animal hides. I even enjoy plugging my ears from the sounds of everyday life, closing out traffic noise, the chatter of strangers, the calculating beeps of checkout stands at the supermarket and creating my own personal soundtrack with the aid of musical mastery reworked over the landscape of my travels.

But too much volume and I’m soured, too much reality to snap me out of my musical trance and I’d rather hear the sounds of car tires bounding over the same pothole in a seamless rhythm, the repeated siren of emergency vehicles urgently rushing someone off into the night.

I share a room with a bird, a love bird specifically, who’s attitudinal chirps are often endearing, and though she and I do not speak the same language we can have an exchange of demeanor and temperament. But at times, even her volume can seem like talons on a chalkboard, the shrill cry of dismay accompanied with crashes, bells and booms from within her cage.

Often times, my mind feels like a caged bird, flooded with sounds and sights that I cannot interpret, that my brain does not understand. Daily I’m bombarded with things that seem to be of the interest of the populous, but do not appeal to me. Specifically the way pop music has evolved over time. In my own teenage evolution, I can remember tuning the radio to a specific point on the dial, waiting anxiously for the DJ to play my ‘jam’. More and more frequently I find myself out of touch with popular culture, being unable to understand the appeal of the music that has become the product of digital culture but without the influence of a wealth of symphonic calculations readily available via the internet.

In it’s ultimate irony the pop music of yesteryear and the bygone practice of instrumental mastery is its missing connection to the sounds of today, whilst commercial products, clothing and textile patterns remain nostalgic, cyclically borrowing from ideas, color combinations and shapes from a past still within reach.

An ear is the way I determine, balance. An ear is the tool I use to understand. An ear is how I set my own mood, the way in which I understand sound. It seems so simple, it’s become part of who we are as people, but does our ability to understand sound evolve as we grow older, or does it become less able to interpret what it hears. Does our preferential differentiation of sounds or music make us more evolved and tell us what we enjoy, or does it simply serve to make us miss the golden days of us waiting with bated breath for our ‘jam’ that may never travel radio waves again?

It’s confusing that I cannot palate the loud drone of the vacuum cleaner, yet, the steady grind of garage bands from the 60s never cease to gratify me. Is it my preference to hear one over the other, or does my mind simply not appropriately interpret the sound of the vacuum. I don’t know much about science or anatomy, but I know what my ears tell me and more often than not, they tell me what I like.