I was just forced from my apartment on account of noise. An unbelievable and shrill buzzsaw that had been screaming along nonstop for at least an hour. By the time I left I was stumbling and shaking in reaction to the noise. Even the vaunted noise-cancelling headphones were ineffectual for this shit. Now I am at The Windmill, typing into a screen I cannot see because of the glare from the sun, which was hiding behind clouds right up until the moment I started typing. No one else is here and I find myself hidden behind a bunch of bushes that were not here on previous visits. I don’t know what is growing on them but they might be tomatoes.
I don’t know if it is related but I swear that ever since the head-bashing incident of 2 weeks ago my misophonia seems worse. Or has it? I don’t know. It’s been a thing for me. Today’s evacuation from the apartment reminded me of CNN in Atlanta. I was there for about 6 months but for the first 6 or 7 weeks the newsroom in which we worked was under construction. Buzzsaws and jackhammers were in use seemingly 24/7. I never complained outright but oh God I hated it there and everybody knew it.
Aggravation leading to today’s exodus from the apartment was compounded by all the usual things: Shit just does not work. I finally got these headphones to work with the PC. I had to get a separate USB Bluetooth dongle. So that was great, until the headphones stopped connecting. I have no idea why and my anger at having to spend a majority of my day diagnosing shit like this prevented me from trying. Apparently Skype takes over the headphones whenever I open that program? Why the hell would that be? So I can plug in the headphones with the cable, which is exactly what I was hoping to not have to do…
Yesterday’s attempts to do simple things all failed. I woke up feeling damn good, too, but that evaporated. The sudden drop in temperature had me sleeping like a conqueror, which has been a problem the last couple of weeks. So even as the day started late I was motivated. Waking up with a semblance of serenity and even happiness is a signal to me that I can be like that. I can be happy.
My goals yesterday included recording at the piano with a microphone into which I uttered exquisitely erudite commentary on what I know or what I think I know about the music at hand. It sounds simple but somehow it is not. The piano and the mic are plugged into the mixing board and the mixing board is connected to the field recorder. I do it this way because the two devices use battery power. Plugging either of them into the wall outlet almost always results in noise coming from the power line. That’s a common problem around here. GODDAMIT THERE ARE FLIES SWARMING ALL OVER ME HERE.
So I plugged the mic in and saw readings on the mixing board’s LCD screen, and I saw readings for the piano. So I figured something was recording. The piano, it turns out, was recording but the voice was not and I cannot fathom why. The headphone jack does not work so I can’t monitor the board that way. At last I did not burn a lot of time doing this but it’s tedious as hell because I have to move the .WAV files from the recorder to the PC, which is a slow process on all counts.
And on and on. Pardon my litany but it’s just this sort of wasted effort and conflicting mindsets that make simple things harder than physical labor for me. I want to sit at the piano and talk like a pianist but I have to solicit cooperation from a bunch of gadgets that just barely fucking work. It used to be when I lost control of software or anything computer-related I would retreat to the piano, where I feel like I have some control of the situation. That has become less of a sure thing as technology invades.
I hear myself getting angry, too. I don’t mean to record that but yesterday some of it leaked through. I start to sound like my mother did when she was absolutely deranged at the hospital one time, drugged up on stuff the names of which I do not recall. I called her and she urged me to call the police because she was being held hostage. It was not what she said that still haunts me. It was the disconnected, surrendered sound of her voice. It was like someone had taken control of her body. Someone else was driving. That’s how my voice sounded in one moment of a recording in which I was able to talk into a microphone and have it record. Such a soiled moment for me.
I contacted Sony yesterday. I’ve been debating whether I should send the field recorder to them for repair or just get another one. They gave me no assurances that I should actually send it to them. I emailed requesting an estimate based on the problems the device has been exhibiting. They politely ignored me. I talked to someone who said that if I want to know what it will cost I have to pony up $135 just for the privilege of having them look at it. After that it’s $135/hour. This differs from the rate I was quoted about a year ago, when I called about this the first time. Back then it was a flat rate of $300. The cost of repair would likely be higher than just getting a new one. But I do love that gadget. I’m just finding it surprisingly confusing to determine if other devices can record 3D binaural audio. It seems you need a certain type of input, at least on modern gadgets. Binaural recording is almost as old as recording itself, but techniques for doing it digitally obviously don’t date back that far. Was going to post a question about this to a friendly sounding discussion group I found.
Pile on to the continuum of aggravation with the fact that Soundcloud might be closing. If they just disappear I don’t think I could possibly recover or replace what I put there. It’s just too much. A lot of it does not matter but still, there’s stuff in there that remains interesting if only for its existence, not necessarily because anyone wants to hear it. I continue to face tedious, seemingly endless cleanup work from the implosion of payphonepictures.com. That site’s destruction remains a mystery to me, one which I don’t expect to revisit. But it’s my own damn fault that it still haunts me. Why did I post images to other sites using direct URLs from that site when I could have just, you know, POSTED THE DAMN IMAGES?
…
An unsolicited message from someone in the payphone business had me kind of scratching my head. He wants me to publicize an incident involving a teenager who ran away (or something like that) and called home from one of the payphones owned by this person who contacted me. Somehow they triangulated or used some kind of smart technology to pinpoint the payphone’s location — I don’t understand why the company doesn’t just know where their phones are based on CallerID, but maybe life isn’t that simple in the biz.
This is the company for which I caused a bunch of trouble some years ago. The person who contacted me is the one who yelled at me about that incident when I attended a meeting of the IPANY (Independent Payphone Association Of New York) a few years ago. I got him into trouble on account of posting a story to my site about how his company had programmed all its phones to send out fake CallerID information, making it look like anyone calling from an NYC subway station was calling from Las Vegas. I don’t know who issued the order but the company was forced to reprogram all its thousands of phones in New York to show correct CallerID. They do not seem to have done this in other cities, if my observations from a trip to Boston 2 or 3 years ago are any indication. Phones there showed the fake Las Vegas CallerID. But for some reason their NYC operation was ordered by someone (I don’t know who) to fix this problem.
Point being… the company helped track down a runaway. Yay. I responded that he may or may not know this but scenarios such as these are the *only* reason the Payphone Project web site continued to exist during the late 1990s and early 2000s. That is not entirely true but it might as well be. As the mighty NYTimes reported back in… 2004? Has it been that long?… my site was used in tracking down a runaway’s location and in other scenarios involving crime and harassment. Hah, I don’t even remember what was in that story anymore. I might not even be right about the runaway scenario…
…
OK, I think I’ve been typing for an hour straight. Feeling closer to sanity. Don’t let it be said that I did not see the humor in being driven out of the apartment by noise. I set up the field recorder to capture the sound. Will listen to it later.
Need food.
