Never The Twain

I don't whether I'm going for incredulity or curmudgeonly with this one. We'll all see as I hammer onto my keyboard.

Yesterday I sold some cables to a perfectly nice young man. I'd say he was 25 or so. He's been to the Shop before, and always calls me sir or Mr. Cosgriff. He never argues price, simply buying what he needs. The guy never gives me grief about cost or service.

Yet he plays his music loud from his work van and leaves it on all the time he's in the old barn. The lyrics are always vile and disgusting and blasting right in front of my place of business. Interestingly too his dog is aways with him, a tiny lap dog of some kind, smaller than a chihuahua. He lets it run all around the Shop barking and yapping. It's never really in the way; indeed it's nice enough to me. Yet it's highly incongruent to the music. That, and the fact that the customer is himself huge, hulking over the toy dog.

That's admittedly unimportant.  To the other stuff, I doubt I ever will but part of me wants to say to this young man, "You're so nice and considerate. Why do you listen to that terrible music and blast it out for the whole neighborhood to hear? You're better than that." 

I genuinely like him. He was buying cables because he'd lost all of his in a broken sewer. I honestly felt bad for him when he told me that. I mean, yes, I make money selling drain snake cables. Yet that doesn't mean I revel in someone's ill fortune. 

Still, the loud, terrible music. I simply have trouble understanding how the two things fit together: nice and considerate all around except for that. It's just beyond me.

Loud Bass

Towards the end of a long day on the road Wednesday, when I was about 30 miles away from the old barn, I noticed a vibration in the steering wheel of my new old van. Nuts, I thought. Probably a wheel out of balance. Maybe it's thrown a weight, or a layer of tread had come loose. Hopefully it would get me home, and I could wait until tomorrow to visit the tire shop.

Yet this vibration began acting particularly odd. It had a beat, an honest to goodness beat. It actually throbbed: boom, buh-da-boom. Boom, buh-da-boom. It repeated itself over and over. I can't say I ever had that reaction from a car before.

The vibration steadily become more emphatic, more intense. Soon I was actually hearing a musical bass line exactly in time with the vibration. Boom, buh-da-boom. Boom, buh-da-boom, it went on. The beat matched the vibration precisely.

That's when I realized I was approaching a Honda Accord with its windows rolled up and dark tinted. The closer I got, the more profoundly the bass line droned and the more harshly my steering wheel vibrated. 

Dude, I could care less what music you listen to. I've even been know to turn my own car radio way up and lose myself in a song with a pronounced, driving (ha, ha) beat. But when your sound system is so loud and your bass up so high that it's causing vibrations in cars passing you on Interstate 94 at better than 70 miles per hour, I only have one thing to say.

It's. Too. Loud. That can't even be comfortable for you. 

A public service announcement

I just want to take a moment here to remind everyone that if you play music too loudly, it will annoy the neighbors.

Other good ways to annoy the neighbors are to take their parking spaces, allow your dog to bark at all hours of the night, leave your bulk trash on their curb, and burn copious amounts of incense next to wide open windows backed by fans on low to blow the smell straight into their houses.

You're welcome.