Squeaky Arts
I’m Dan Piraro, the creator of the Bizarro newspaper comic. Each week, I post my Sunday Bizarro comic, then a short essay, then the past week’s Monday-Saturday Bizarro comics written and drawn by my partner, Wayno. He does a weekly blog post, too, and I highly recommend it.
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Hola y bienvenidos Pepinillos de Jazz. For my unspanishized readers, that’s “Hello and welcome, Jazz Pickles.”
I’m fortunate to be able to say that I’m not a person prone to illness or complexes. I do, however, have some chronic hearing problems. I’ve got very loud tinnitus and can no longer understand speech when there is a lot of ambient noise like at restaurants or parties. Now that I have a reason to think about my hearing, I realize it has always been more sensitive than the people around me. I can’t help but wonder if that sensitivity was related to my hearing problems now.
I’m not sure about my loss of hearing in general, but I’m confident that my tinnitus is my own fault, from a single motorcycle ride I took around 15 years ago during which I wore earbuds for about three hours. I’ve always been sensitive to loud sounds and really dislike high volume. I’ve always worn earplugs or stuffed cocktail napkins into my ears when listening to live music and even did so when I was in a band years ago.
So on this one motorcycle trip, I turned the music up only loud enough to hear it over the ambient noise of the motor and wind. It did not sound very loud to me and I thought I was being careful not to overdo it. When I arrived at my destination and took my earbuds out, however, I had a ringing in my ears that has never subsided for a moment since.
I tell you this partly as a cautionary tale. I see folks with earbuds all the time and wonder if they know how easy it is to ruin your peace forever. I’ve read that buds are even more dangerous than cup-style headphones because they fit more snugly and trap sound.
I’m just saying that once may be all it takes. It was for me.
Unlikely as it sounds, this story actually has something to do with the Sunday cartoon above. Though I like the art of balloon sculpture, I cannot stand the sound of one being made. The squeaking is painful. I instinctively jerk to cover my ears when I hear it but I don’t notice anyone else doing that. When I lived in NYC, I regularly rode the subway but could not endure the sound of a train pulling into the station and hitting its brakes without covering my ears. Again, I was the only one doing this.
Same story for styrofoam coolers in cars. My family used to take car trips and they sometimes included a cooler in the back of the station wagon. As the car jostled, the cooler would emit tiny squeaks, like the sound of mice having raucous sex. It drove me nuts. The rest of my family barely noticed, but I’d be frantically unbuckling my seatbelt and clambering into the back to move it or cushion it in a way that would make it stop. I suppose it goes without saying that even typing the words, “fingernails on a chalkboard,” gives me fits.
Unfortunately, it isn’t just the obvious culprits like squeaking balloons and chalkboards that drive me batty. I can’t concentrate if there’s a dog barking nearby, music coming from a neighbor’s house, or a car alarm three blocks away. A wind chime on someone’s porch makes me want to outlaw them. (Windchimes, not porches. Although I’d outlaw porches, too, if it would stop the windchimes.)
And ironically, while the thing I crave the most is silence, when I get it, my tinnitus is that much louder. True silence is not a thing I’ve experienced in over 15 years.
I’ve lived in Mexico now for nearly six years and it is noisy. I often jokingly say, “You don’t move to Mexico for the peace and quiet.” But the funny thing is that instead of driving me into a cave somewhere, the frequent exposure to neighborhood noise has seemed to dampen my sense of annoyance somewhat. I suppose you really can get used to anything. Or maybe my brain has reached its limit on the number of things it can pay attention to simultaneously.
When I’m having one of those moments in which I’m really noticing the constant, high-pitch hiss of my tinnitus and wondering if it will ever drive me off the ledge, I recall that Beethoven was nearly completely deaf when he wrote his 9th symphony, a piece of music that has particularly spoken to me over the years. It is said that all he could hear by that time was bass drums and cannon fire, which I can relate to because it is the direction my hearing is headed: I can no longer hear many high-pitched sounds at all, and men’s voices are far easier to understand than women’s.
So when I’m tempted to feel down about it, I tell myself that if Ludwig van could endure near-total deafness and still create a masterpiece of such complexity, I can endure a little hiss that follows me everywhere, and keep drawing silly pictures. It’s all a matter of being more conscious of what I have than what is missing. This, as it turns out, is the key to happiness in every corner of our lives.
What we have next in this shared corner of our lives are some chuckle-triggers from my exceedingly able colleague, Wayno. Let’s begin…
If you love swine and togas as much as I do, this cartoon is for you!
I only paid $75 for this handful of cherries!
The word “prick” springs to mind for more than one reason.
I was hoping that someday someone could explain to me what the fascination for NFTs is, but if they just disappear from the face of the earth before that happens, that’s fine, too.
There are some fun background jokes in this one and in Wayno’s blog post this week, he shows a few more he added to the strip version of this comic. He also has a pretty good “pipe pic” this week!
The previous tenant was a dove but we’ve had it thoroughly cleaned.
Until next week, does “it’s always something” necessarily mean that “it’s never nothing?”
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