The Kennel Kernel

I see noise in shapes. There are grey covered overcast skies of background hum, delightful when there's a break in the cloud & sunbeams of other senses shine through & provide their own illuminations. There are little sparkly bits of pleasure, mostly musical or that of birds, which is of course composed of notes. Great visceral tidal waves or breakers over the rocks of engines. And then there's discord which I find possesses an angle of point defined by the pitches involved. Sharp & piercing are created by higher frequencies of short duration; a more wedge shape made by lower more sonorous disharmony.

The ones I find most difficult to deal with are the sharply pointed ones. I think we're probably all pre-programmed that way-the response to a baby's & child’s cries & so we should be. But when emulations trot along it confuses my brain. That dog isn't in distress. It's pretty damned happy & it wants more. But it goes right to the front of my head & hurts.

Then there are special cases. Mine are sneezes. It's like a blunderbuss to my head, again no surprise as a sneeze contains all the frequencies in the audible spectrum but they do for me. Ah, one final bit of the analogy I omitted. The amplitude of all of them or in non-tech, how loud they are. This quality is Wile E Coyote's ACME anvil & the bigger the lump of metal & the higher up the cliff it falls from dictates how much damage it does to me. Quite a good one I thought. Wedge shape hammered in-forces the crack a bit wider. Pointy one impales it into the centre of my brain. But the colossal gratuitous vulgar sneeze is Coyote's anvil dropped from space onto a shed full of high explosive, clad in ball bearings & driven further into my cranium by the inevitable locomotive emerging at full steam from the suddenly appeared tunnel. It fucking hurts & I swear every time it robs me of a little something. Sometimes, & it's always unexpected, there's some cuddly wuddly beary beary boo who manages a tsunami of sneezes. And here we discover the poor bedraggled & beaten up Wile E isn't on the valley's floor at all. Oh no. He believes he is, he think's it's all over, but in fact he's just landed on a precipice. And we all know what happens next until he really does hit the final deck. Where, natch, he gets run over by that fucking train again & the roadrunner turns up to do 'dibble dibble' at the stars round his head. Small wonder he hates it so much.

And then there's the special case of special case sneezes. I can't tell you much more because I think I've had to repress the memory of each occurrence, but the net effect is like when Tom Cat catches Jerry Mouse by sandwiching him in a mahoosive cymbal clap, & Jerry emerges stunned with his entire body staccatoilly vibrating like an epileptic punk pogoing on an 11kv line.

I mentioned a bit earlier that I think a bit of me is diminished by every pointy one & esp. the trumpeting blunderbuss fired at the cymbals, which is not to say that it doesn't recover in time, but a volley of canon fire doesn't give one a lot of chance to rebuild. And so it is here with the dogs, the traffic, the fucking telephone (pointy & jangly) &, oh god. The pollen. What did I ever do to all the trees & flowers to deserve this kind of warfare?

Oh and one more special case. The squished sneeze-you know the one that people try to hold in? I swear whenever I hear the pneumatic TSCHHHHH after the 'aaahhhatttchhh' my body delivers a sympathy fart. And that's not a good thing when you've already got your teeth clenched & muscles all tensioned up. Has the potential for embarrassment down the launderette. 'Goodness-near moment on the bike?' 'Not quite-some other buggers sneezing near me actually.' 'You're very weird.'

It's not all bad the panoply of human noises. Monks for example. I like chants & I love choirs & I adore girly vocals. The German in me likes a good wet bottom burp. The schadenfreude of someone else sitting on a drawing pin-pointy in every way of course. And when I was at the airport I'd sneak away on long day for a quick 40winks in a departure lounge, where the Babel of other languages being spoken by 1000s of people was rather like the lullaby of Alfred’s babbling brook. But even then the dreamscript can be turned by the quality of what's being said. I might not have word of Italian in my lexicon but you can certainly get the drift of their conversation if they're getting a bit het up. And then there’s ‘ugly speech’: German, Slavonics & very possibly English as well. But the sound of laughter softens everything, unless they’re laughing at you. That's a rum one laughter because we're back to percussive sounds again, but it has such a different effect. Like a boom of a celebratory bass drum or the peel of bells; even tinkly silver ones. Babel didn't get that one. Laughter & tears are universal language. The infectious Charlotte Green disolving into helpless giggles whilst reading the news about Jack Tuat, which should be on the internet & also the NHS, but sadly appears on neither. Melancholic oboes. Lachrymatory violins. A bugle playing the last lament. And what on earth is it with bagpipes? They make me want to burst into tears & at the same time pick up the warhammer & rush straight into battle. Military Intelligence might well be an oxymoron, but the forces have learned a thing or two about music & movement over the years. Play it all loud enough & you might well not notice you've had your legs blown off because you were to busy singing along. Until the music stops.

And that's my point (ha) really. I wish it would stop. Just for a bit so I can mend, repair, nail a few bits of wood over where the holes are. But no. So if the noise won't play ball then I shall have to take the ball away & fuck off somewhere else, just for a bit. Which is to say that I'm having a brief holiday from myself. Toodle pip & please no-one fall off their bikes or perches.

TTFN (which one would normally decode as an archaic Ta Ta For Now, but in this case you can substitute Totally Toxicated & Fucked by Noise.)

Whilst I’m away would someone please find by hook or by crook the audio fromTwatgate for me?!
http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2004/mar/03/tvandradio