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Tuesday, May 1, 2012

Yet Fresher Auditory Hell

Hello there, Mr. Baby:

It's been a while.  As you are aware, we have been quite busy you and I.   You, pondering the multifarious mysteries of the universe, and I cleaning up the aftermath of your robust and maladroit methodologies.  I haven't, really, any time to write letters of complaint - not if we're going to keep at bay the relentless tides of excruciatingly sharp-edged Leggo blocks, scraps of potentially once-important papers, cleverly smuggled rocks (selected, with apparent care, from the heaps of dry and clean stones for their high degree of mud and shit content), fistfuls of mashed and partially digested bread products, abused and beloved recycling items, bears, blankets, and those lovely cubes that intermittently dispense in perpetuum the cheerfuckingest arrangements of segments of Eine Kleine Nachtmusik ever imagined.  All of which you are employing in what seems to me to be quite a haphazard and unsystematic set of experiments centering around our good friend gravity.  (Again). To be honest, I haven't minded terribly being relegated to the less-than-glamorous role of lab janitor, because there are moments - beautiful and ephemeral moments - in which you actually entertain yourself. 

However, you occasionally hit a snag.  An item shaped like a star, to your angry befuddlement, will not allow itself to be crammed into a hole shaped like an octagon.  Your bears are fat and tall and will not, despite your best efforts, be confined to the space into which you have smashed a number of other tiny items without problems.  A car, overturned and pummeled into a tractor, cannot be removed with the same ease as it was earlier when it was on wheels.  Your sippy cup straw sometimes comes unplugged.

Gone are the days of screaming, of more screaming, of horrible sounds, and of the ambiguous and adamant NO.  No, from the apparently fathomless well of abrasive sounds you have extracted yet another menace to our sanity, another vicious assault on poise and composure.

Literature on the subject suggests that this sound be met with calm and silence.  Demonstrate, the experts say, that you are in control by not reacting to your toddler.

Okay, but:...I'd like to know this: have any of these assholes actually heard this fucking sound? 

In attempting to describe this, I am rendered helpless yet again by the exquisite hellishness of your sensory production.  Words fail us again, Mr Baby.  I suppose it's as if someone boiled together the auditory essence of: a crow being tortured in the throat of a seagull, of a cat being slowly flayed by dragging it across a chalkboard, of all the hypersensitive fire alarms in the middle of all the nights, of bagpipes played by tone-deaf amateurs, and, for good measure, even more tortured animals - all of the peacocks and cats who were ever shredded by predators or accidentally set on fire  - and distilled them into one incomprehensibly potent sound, yet still I think this description does it no justice.

The Whine.  

The Whine can permeate all things.  I feel certain my blood is actually curdled by the deranged and impossible frequency at which it resonates.  It is impossible to do anything, and impossible to not do anything, when the Whine is being broadcast. (Science backs me up here). And as you stand there, holding your truck upside down and at arms length, a Leggo block (a seemingly innocuous item but actually the harbinger of an auditory apocalypse) trapped in the driver's cabin, your face contorted into the almost comical but mostly terrifying expression required to birth this awful noise, I have but one thought in the milliseconds of silence that precede the Whine.  And that is this:

There has got to be a way to weaponize this shit. 

2 comments:

  1. Holy shit...I missed this one. But why would the DoD need The Whine when they have 'Achy Breaky Heart'? That shit tore Waco UP.

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