Some Thoughts on Headphones
1.
Last night, talking to a friend who just completed an MA in literature and now works in a Barnes and Noble, I articulated what might be my biggest fear: that I am unable to think properly, because my brain is broken. I imagine my friend and his professors and the critics they read and the friends those critics hold forth with in panels and professors’ lounges starting with one clean pure simple untested thought and then letting that thought crisply guide them towards increasingly complex thoughts, until they’ve developed whole thought-systems that can then be employed in the service of better understanding humanity/Henry James/Lana Del Ray’s authenticity, or in prize-winning essays, or in impressing people with their intellect. Whereas thinking for me is like hunting without any training or coordination, maybe shooting a small sickly squirrel here and there and then rushing over to it, ripping apart its innards in search of usable scraps and ending up with a mess and a headache. And in wondering why that might be I realized that for most of my life my thoughts have been vying to be heard over music played at maximum volume through the kind of large headphones where the other day a kid named Christian asked “so what kind of music do you listen to?” and I hesitated because the easiest answer is “indie rock” but that sounds wrong and not only means nothing but signifies a whole bunch of different things to different people, but then I said “indie rock” and he said “makes sense. You know, with the headphones,” and went on to say something about Garden State.
2.
A dead iPod or broken headphones turn me into a manic-depressive on the upswing: I’ll start calling friends at odd hours, or singing both to myself and whoever’s in earshot; I’ll try reading while walking at night, the logic I guess being that one must be constantly stimulated, even if said stimulation comes at the cost of accidentally slamming one’s head into a lightpost while reading that New Yorker article about the minimalist sculptor who may or may not have killed his wife.
3.
If a film critic were reviewing my life they’d probably comment on how my soundtrack of carefully curated early ’90s shoegaze songs, played loudly over every single scene and played louder over moments that are ostensibly supposed to be more emotional or significant, serves to obscure whatever actual feeling or substance is actually there, to the point where the music is entirely dictating the tone of the life. But what happens when I fire the music supervisor, punch up the script, let the life speak for itself?
