Friday, October 31, 2014

The Golden Mean




I hear things. I mean I hear noises that aren't there, or at least that nobody else can hear. I am tired of pointing them out or asking, "Can't you hear that?" because I am tired of that puzzled, pucker-browed, "are-you-off-your-nut?" look. So I keep it to myself now.

At night, I am subjected to hums. Deep hums, what I call the "doomy" sound, a low vibrating almost grinding tone on one note. It goes on and on. But wait, there's more. There's a sort of dumble-dum, bom, bom, bom, dumble-dum thing that happens too, and even a sort of searing frying electrical thing like the feeling you get before you are about to receive a powerful electric shock.

It's mostly in the house. I don't know where any of these are coming from. A small pulsating sound comes from my computer - sometimes - because when I turn it off, it stops - sometimes.

It must be coming from outside, but when I go outside, it stops. Or changes or something. Anyway, I can't hear it.

Sometimes, our neighbors give parties with loud techno-beat music, with the same sizzling searing BOM, da da da, BOM. It's a little like that, but this is all the time. I don't know if it has always been there because it's only there when I am paying attention to it, as I have been lately. It's subliminal, almost, as if some obscure god is trying to slowly drive me crazy.




It's not the fridge. I had hoped it was the fridge with a hope so fervent, it was like hoping that cute guy would notice you when you were seventeen years old and felt like a mutant. It's not the electronics downstairs, the TV or the DVR, as Bill keeps saying. He is logical, he is a scientist.  Once you've eliminated everything it ISN'T, then you will come down to what it IS.

I don't know if this is inside my head, or just my excruciatingly sensitive hearing (a gift and a curse), or my ability to fasten on and focus. Whatever you focus on will increase; thus speak the sages.

So I come to my point: I am on a search to intelligently white-noise this out so I can work when it gets really bad. For some reason it is at its worst during heavy rain at night. Since it always rains heavily at night in Vancouver, I sometimes feel I am screwed. But being solution-oriented and always up for a quest, I keep on.




So for the wahwahwahwahwah, the droannnnnnnn, the dooooooooooooooooooom, the bumble-dum-dum-dum, the searing sparks, there is a small remedy. It is this music. I usually loathe this sort of thing and won't listen to it. But I went through every kind of white-sound or nature-noise recording that existed, and some of them were very nice (I was especially fond of the eight hours of continuous train sounds), but they didn't do anything for the noise. In fact, like a bee in a bottle, they sometimes paradoxically concentrated the hum or doom in the middle of my head, where it drove me even more crazy.

This is only 40 minutes or so, and there's a small break in the middle which means it's likely a 20-minute loop. During a small portion of it, there is rushing water, then it stops. I wish the rushing water were on all the time because I love rushing water (but it won't cancel the noise by itself - not even a Niagara-like waterfall). But the rest of it works for me BECAUSE it is a continuous, droning, humming buzz with some birdsounds and what sounds like a marimba picking out a small riff around that constant unvarying drone.

Tonight as I sit here, very late, too late really, I should be in bed, it's a BAM bam bam bam, BAM bam bam bam sort of thing, like trapped electricity buzzing in a very tall glass jar with  straight sides. It's what a migraine would be like if a migraine were rendered into sound.  It reminds me a bit of Paul McCartney's doomy BAWMbombombom BAWMbombombom bass guitar drone in the song Helter Skelter. It's evil, it's the aliens, it's the implant they stuck up my nose in 1983. They are still in contact with me and want me to act, but I won't. I MUST listen to YouTube. Must. Must. The aliens must die.



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Don't come alone: Halloween horrors

 

































No words for this. None are needed.



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Caitlin: you made me a grandma!






To honour an amazing day, the day I watched my first grandchild Caitlin's birth. She gave me a new life, a new self, and  a reason to carry on when all seemed lost. Today she is eleven years old. We do mad scientist crafts together, baking experiments, make YouTube videos (ferociousgumby!), and have all sorts of riotous fun.




























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Strange Apocalyptic Sounds WORLDWIDE 2013





If you want to scare the shit out of yourself, listen to these. NOBODY can explain what is going on here. Scientists are saying things like, "A glacier moved". Obviously the people involved are way freaked out.

I want to write about hearing shit, I mean the shit I hear that I don't even want to hear. My hearing is so hypersensitive it's almost a joke, and lately it seems I can hear a ladybug walking up a plant stalk somewhere on the next street (while I'm sleeping). Makes no sense. I'm even using noise-cancelling YouTube videos to deal with it.

I tried to find out something about tinnitus, which I don't think it is, but was completely intimidated when I read in Wikipedia that some forms of tinnitus can be heard from outside the person's head. In other words, they are BROADCASTING the thing. Science fails us.





 


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