Peripheral Noise

Tech, Worldview, Drowning

Before we begin, Francesca Albanese, UN Special Rapporteur, has released her report detailing the web of power – financial, political, and institutional – that has devastated Palestine. An excerpt:

“The genocide in Gaza was not committed in isolation, but as part of a system of global complicity. Rather than ensuring that Israel respects the basic human rights and self-determination of the Palestinian people, powerful Third States – perpetuating colonial and racial-capitalist practices that should have long been consigned to history – have allowed violent practices to become an everyday reality. Even as the genocidal violence became visible, States, mostly Western ones, have provided, and continue to provide, Israel with military, diplomatic, economic and ideological support, even as it weaponized famine and humanitarian aid. The horrors of the past two years are not an aberration, but the culmination of a long history of complicity.”

The world is loud.

I have a box of disposable earplugs that I often wear when trying to fall asleep. These are different earplugs to the fancy (for earplugs) emerald green-colored reusable set I carry with my house keys for when the world gets too loud, though these earplugs are also green; more of a seafoam.

Anyways, I pop them in when there’s noise inside the house or out as I try to drift off, or if I’m trying to take a nap at three in the afternoon. I reuse a pair for a couple of weeks and then switch to new ones. I am not here to debate the hygiene of such practice, I’m just living authentically.

The act of blocking out peripheral noise is something that has always helped me focus; on sleeping, on reading, even just on breathing.

So one night I’m trying to fall asleep, right?

It’s dark, and my roommate’s Netflix show is tossing a lot of self-assured dialogue and confidently enunciated consonants up the stairs. I grope around and cannot find my latest set, so I turn on the light; the big overhead light that barely illuminates the room.

A wonderful and indispensable feature of being the person that I am is that the earplug box is empty and they are strewn about the room. There is one on my bedside table and one on my desk that I never use as a desk; both are fresh and firm.

My first thought is, my god it feels incredible to plug in a fresh new pair, what a rejuvenating rush. I flick the lights off and crawl back into bed and feel something odd at my feet when I pull up the sheets. I reorient myself and feel it with my hands. It must be a rogue ear plug but it is somehow underneath the fitted sheet?

Still in the dark I locate the nearest edge of the fitted sheet, lift it, reach in, and pull out an ear plug. I laugh, place it on the desk, and sit back into bed with my hands behind me to let it anticipate my weight when suddenly, again, still in the dark, with both ears flummoxed, another plug that was somehow caught up in the sheets appears in my right hand.

It just appears there, I can think of no more exciting way to write it. I sit back and it is there.

I chuckle, a little more nervously this time, worried I might have landed in some Sisyphean earplug nightmare. I become a serpent and I slither back into my cradle. There are no more surprise guests; at least, none reveal themselves.

Sleep has always accepted me with reluctance. When I’m out, I’m out. I have been informed that I snore.

There are worlds beneath. Worlds within. We are all too distracted from the one all of us share.

It’s the next day now. The morning is uneventful if you ignore that everything is falling apart. Another once-in-a-lifetime hurricane is ripping through the Caribbean.

I walk down the street and foliage has started to cascade like foreshadows of snowfall. I eye my hands as the world grows colder, unsure if they’re showing age or simply dry as hell because I don’t moisturize or drink enough water.

To what extent is indoctrinated ageism impacting my line of thought? Shouldn’t it be a mark of honor to have hands that bear evidence of use? Scrapes and scars and heart-soul-lines?

I slather each hand with Vaseline and stuff them into a pair of red-and-white padded Santa stockings... To retain the moisture. Like a cabaret performance of the appearance-obsessed American, I march around with fuzzy knit lobster claws; I let the juices marinate my hands; I pursue tender flesh.

Once as a child I applied a thin layer of Vaseline to chapped lips on a summer morning. Like a beautiful horse learning not to touch an electric fence, I discovered on that day that Vaseline is best applied after the sun has set. The ensuing sunburn would demand, with iron-throated audacity, quite a bit more Vaseline to soothe.

I stream music on Qobuz and prepare a professional pitch to encourage my family to cancel our Spotify subscription. Not just because the CEO is an asshole, but largely due to that. This is the pitch:

The quality of the audio on Qobuz is richer—deeper than I have heard through headphones in a long time… maybe ever. I listen to well-worn songs as if brand new. It feels epiphanic. A discovery. A knife stabs me out of nowhere while I ride the bus, but the knife is a realization: There has always been an even richer world of sound to explore and I have been missing out.

The power of our dollars as consumers, especially when we organize and coordinate, is extraordinary. This is an open call to tech-minded entrepreneurs: I am actively looking to transition my spending towards services that operate ethically. A few examples from Qobuz include properly paying artists, delivering a quality product, and not investing in drone-powered class warfare. I don’t need you to check every box, but I am done accepting so low a standard.

My government sold my future to a bunch of tech companies and I am mad at both the tech companies and my government. This does not equate to me hating the people involved in either of those entities, but it is growing closer every day, babes. I didn’t realize how easy every large company would find it to give up the illusion of caring. To announce mass layoffs while forty million Americans prepare to lose access to food assistance is equivocal to condemning millions to death.

There’s a new rose reaching supernova at the highest reach of the bush that winds up my handrail. It is slightly farther than my reach allows, at least without losing balance and falling into the thorns. It holds within it the consuming memory of Springtime, of all the blooms that preceded it and are yet to come.

I don’t think art is the only way to understand the world. I just think it is the most accessible one. For me. I am still struggling to grasp the circumstances of everything. Art reminds me that there is goodness, that there is hope.

I listen to two new single releases, “Sympathy Magic” by Florence and the Machine, and “Berghain” by ROSALÍA featuring Björk and Yves Tumor. My pulse races, each experience strikes directly into whatever reservoir remains in me of pure artistic hope. For all of my criticisms of art in the digital age, there is so much incredible work to be found. It makes me so excited to be alive.

I continue to listen and my realization deepens, the knife twists: digital enshittification has changed the very make-up of my world. Without my knowledge it has altered how I hear music. I have never been granted access to the artists’ full visions by the services distributing them.

I hear D’Angelo again in even greater clarity and it is just... Sensual is not the right word but it’s in that neighborhood. It’s callipygian. Lascivious. Layered decadence, wrapped up in my blue polyester blanket like a Smurfing yule log.

I’m so angry that this feeling has been kept from me for so long. How many more hidden colors have been lost in the tech industry’s disrespect towards art? I might be feeling a bit dramatic about this but I’m starting to get myself worked up about it.

How the hell have we been letting them get away with distributing such poor quality products for such astronomical prices? Oh it’s more complicated than that, but I’m actually realizing that, no, it’s not. It was a choice to make everything shittier and attempt to repeat the process forever. It was a choice to lock us in place. It was a choice to ignore the climate crisis. It was a choice.

I stay with Florence. I go back in time. I have a teenage-body dramatic moment listening to “Ceremonials”, her second album which bears deep thematically ties to death by drowning. My mind presents a recent wound: a letter from a man who drowned whilst trying to emigrate from Sudan. What might those moments feel like?

Maybe first the body tries to gasp for air but, finding none, takes on water with desperation. Every cubic gulp of space demands oxygen and constricts; lungs engorge with frost. The senses fuzz. Perhaps the feeling of water might transform from a buoyant, stabbing chill to a serene, enticing lull. Maybe darkness; at first the brutal kind that hurts the eyes at midnight, will become a gentler, more familiar darkness. The kind of darkness one seems to recall from a time before birth.

“[...] I am sorry, divers and search teams for the missing, for I do not know the name of the sea I drowned in. Rest assured, asylum office, I will not be a heavy burden on you. Thank you, sea, for welcoming us without a visa or a passport. Thank you to the fish that will share my flesh and will not ask me about my religion or political affiliation. Thank you to the news channels that will report the news of our death for five minutes every hour for two days.”

(Source)

I can’t believe we’re squandering our one chance like this. And for what, for money? That bitch?

When I write about listening to the city sing, and how, much of the time, its volume can overwhelm, I do so because I am attempting to recognize a miracle. I watch Bisan Owda report through the night, unable to sleep due to a continuing assault on her home; poisoning her people’s land with uranium.

Not to get all hippie about it but I think we deprive our fellow humans and our innate humanity of so much vitality when we refuse to listen to the Earth. I have; in my life and in this otherworldly moment that feels like a collaboration between every past, present, and future version of me, experienced miracles far more frequently than miracles should reasonably happen. This leads me to believe that I am privy to knowledge that the world needs to hear, not necessarily from me.

I intend to do two things: I intend to appreciate art as it evolves into whatever it becomes next – I intend, too, to be involved in that evolution. I also intend to maintain as much steady focus as I can on right now. The absolute state of us. The overlapping travesties and the systems of power that led to them; Sudan, Congo, Palestine, Ukraine, Jamaica, Alaska… And I intend to keep a vicious line of sight on the still-gleaming beacons of light.

Crime is going to increase in cities as people get desperate for money. Critically, though, and do not lose sight of this: reporting on crime in cities is going to get more intense and more targeted. Focus through the peripheral noise.

Thank you for reading. If you found it worthwhile, please consider subscribing for free or sharing. As always, you can find me on Instagram and nowhere else on the Internet for now.

With Sincerity,

J.K.