Of Needles in My Ear.

 

            So, Esso gas stations have now taken up blaring advertisements from their pumps.

            Advertising is obnoxious at the best of times, but there is something particularly, murderously, irritating about it coming from a gas pump. Perhaps it’s the proximity to my ear: a TV blaring in the distance, or a loudspeaker overhead, can somewhat be tuned out. But a speaker blaring directly in my ear like an airhorn – that’s my personal space right there. My poor old ADD brain can’t handle disembodied voices in my ear while I’m trying to perform a task, even one as simple as pumping gas.

            Especially one as simple as pumping gas.

            Fact is, I don’t want those little needle voices injecting themselves into my brain at any time. I don’t care what the reason are, it’s an intrusion, and I don’t want it.

            We live in an era where commercial interests feel entitled to blare noise at you at every given opportunity, and society as whole, enamoured as it is with noise, feels no need push back. Silence in the public sphere is treated much like farmland or green space: empty voids to fill with things, preferable profitable. Of no intrinsic value in itself. These days even libraries are blaring inane shit through loudspeakers and screens.

            Ray Bradbury predicted it all of course. A huge theme of Fahrenheit 451 is not just the burning of the books, but the sheer amount of noise inflicted on everyone all hours of the day, so that no one is ever alone with their thoughts. I’ve lost count over the years of how often I’ve felt like the protagonist Guy Montag, as he sat on a subway train trying to remember some lines of poetry.

 

            Trumpets blared. “Dendam’s Dentrifice!”

            “Shut up!” thought Montag. Consider the lilies of the field

            “Dendam’s Dentrifice!”

            They toil not. . .

            “Dendam’s. . .”

            Consider the lilies of the field, shut up, shut up!   

            “Dentrifice!”

            He tore the book open and flicked the pages and felt them as if he were blind, he picked at the shape of the individual letters, not blinking.

            “Dendham’s! Spelled ‘D.E.N…”

            They toil not, neither do they. . .

            A fierce whisper of hot sand through an empty sieve. . .

            “Dendham’s does it!”

            Consider the lilies, the lilies, the lilies. . .

            “Dendham’s Dental Detergent!”

            “Shut up! Shut up! Shut up!”

            It was a plea, a cry so terrible that Montag found himself on his feet.

 

            How often I’ve just wanted to scream shutupshutupshutup! at the incessant racket all around – not least on the trains, as the recorded voice repeatedly warns people, in English and French, not to stand in front of oncoming trains. At least they’ve not introduced advertising or muzak yet, which I am sure some folks would be only too pleased to have (don’t get me started on those cretins who actually tried to put muzak in schools. In Bradbury’s book, people wanted the distraction, actively feared and dreaded silence, and the unwanted thoughts that might emerge within it. Our world has very much fallen into that pit – can anybody be alone with their thoughts anymore, without whipping out the phone?

 

            I’m not blameless in this regard: my own pohone has become something of a defence against other people’s phones. Like going armed with one’s own six-shooter into a wild west saloon, it feels necessary. My ADD brain may crave the dopamine, but my soul recoils at it.

            Again, I must defer to Bradbury. In “The Murderer”, a man is jailed for waging his own personal war against noisemakers. His description of the phone feels prescient: the “Ghost Machine. Voices without bodies.” He then goes on to describe the long term effects of phone dependency: “it just drained your personality away until what slipped through at the other end was some cold fish of a voice, all steel, copper, plastic, no warmth, no reality.”

            I’m tempted to quote “The Murderer” in full, every line being so damn perfect. Substitute a few words, and you’ve got the exact encapsulation of our modern lives:

 

The telephone’s such a convenient thing: it just sits there and demands you call [text] someone who doesn’t want to be called [texted]. Friends were always calling, calling, calling [texting, texting, texting] me. Hell, I hadn’t any time of my own. When it wasn’t the television or radio or the phonograph [Facebook, Youtube, Tik-tok], it was motion pictures at the corner theatre, motion pictures projected, with comericials on low -lying cumulus clouds. . .music by Mozzek in every restaurant; music and commercials on the busses I rode to work. When it wasn’t music, it was interoffice communications, and my horror chamber or a radio wristwatch on which my friend and my wife phoned every five minutes.

           

            In some ways Bradbury was too optimistic: his characters are bombarded with Beethoven’s 5^th, Bach, Hayden, Rachmaninoff, and Duke Ellington. We should be so lucky: autotuned, drum-machined, sampled, AI-Generated digital slop is what we get in our dentists offices and grocery stores. But the principle stands. The main character is driven to dump chocolate ice cream into every device he sees, and it is strongly implied that his prison shrink will come round to his point of view. Glorious wish-fulfillment fantasy.  

            Anyway, I get my gas at Petro-Canada now in glorious silence. Who knows how long they’ll hold out, or what I’ll do after they decide to puncture the bubble. Buy a donkey I suppose.