9.04.2025

To block out the world I listen to music that sounds like the interludes you hear in NPR and PBS programs. Bubbly little snippets of melody. If a song has words in it I start thinking about the words and then all I can think about is words and how words sound and do they even mean anything and whose business is it anyway? Soundtracks, scores, synthetic triads, samples from ancient jazz tunes no one living has ever heard played live. The click of a ceiling fan as backbeat. Dogs snoring on either side of me in duet. Anything, even a leaf blower on a loop or a semiregular Delta faucet drip. Windchimes in discord with a super pissed off crow. Maybe it's not the absence of words but the need to be free of deliberate human noise. Unmuffled engines and the clueless shouting into speakerphones. Knowitalls chattering just out of sight, on the other side of a fence or in a room down the hall. Talkers and yellers and sneezers and subvocalizers. Hush.