This week I sat in a chair at the office of an ENT doc as he used long, thin metal forceps, dozens of tubes of gushing warm water and multiple doses of room temperature air administered through a plastic cone to remove wax and hair and god knows what else out of my ears.

I tell you this not to gross you out but to reveal that sometimes getting older and not being able to hear as well as you once did does not mean you are going deaf.

It means your ears have literally clogged themselves.

So imagine what we’re doing to our minds.

OK, we’ll get to that in a moment. 

For now let’s stay with the ears.

If they’re backed up please know you have done nothing wrong

Despite the fact that this medical professional at one point (during more than a full hour of this) looked at me and asked, when was the last time you had your ears cleaned?

To which I replied:

I didn’t even know that was a thing. I mean, I’m very diligent about this kind of stuff.   (Note:  Defensive but seriously, I am NOT a dirty person…in that way)  And aren’t you supposed to not dig too deep with a Q-tip?

He kind of chuckled, said yes, and continued his work.

I never did find out if he kind of blamed me but I didn’t care.

Because by the time he was done and I had my hearing checked (Note: Normal) the most bizarre thing happened. 

Suddenly everything was….

LOUD.  Like, really

LOUD.

It felt like everyone was a member of the LOUD family from SNL (Note: As opposed to PBS’ Loud family, which was a whole other thing – ask a boomer, or the LOUD family of Nickelodeon – ask a Gen Zer) saying the most innocuous things you didn’t want reverberating in your brain.

Imagine how I then felt going down the elevator when a baby was crying and a young woman speaking on her cell phone suddenly got disconnected. (Note: Okay, I enjoyed the latter).

But by the time I got into my car, where the radio turned on automatically, it was

CRUSHINGCRUSHINGCRUSHINGCRUSHING!!!

Was I really listening to the Broadway channel at this decibel??? 

Well, perhaps I really wanted to hear Les Misérables.

But then I lowered it and switched to MSNOW.  It was still BLASTING.  And about you know who threatening to tear down the Kennedy Center.

Is this the kind of stuff I was feeding into my brain and, when the windows were open, out into the world?

No wonder I’ve been so les misérables lately.

This got me thinking about so many things.  But mostly about what all of us are trying so desperately to hear and not hear so many hours of the day.

And view.

What are we choosing to pollute our brains with? 

And exactly what is an influencer?

Because when you hear everything shouting out so loud at decibels you can barely endure you more than ever stop and begin to consider that maybe it would be better to turn it all off and…

BE SILENT.

Then reboot with something, anything else for at least a palette cleanser or at most bit more main course nourishing.

I was reading an article in The Atlantic the other day entitled, The Age of Reading Is Over. Much to my judgmental surprise I found out towards the end it was written by a young woman in her twenties, one who grew up in a “family of readers,” where her Dad read to and with her from books almost every night through middle school and, several years later, her older sisters invited her to join their book club.

Her name is Rose Horowitch and her extensive reportage on the subject is sobering and, yes, well worth a READ.

It was reported a few years ago by the NEA (National Endowment for the Arts), which once did the most comprehensive survey of the nation’s reading habits, that in 2022  fewer than half of all adults reported reading ANY KIND OF BOOK all year.

Not Catcher in the Rye.  Not Catch-22. Not even The Cat in the Hat.

And this was across all age groups, education levels and demographics.  And included audio and e-books.

After giving us a history of reading dating back more than several thousands years, she also quotes numerous social scientists and neurological experts about the dangers to the brain of watching short clips and scanning short paragraphs of condensed summaries of books on your phone and computer rather than the entire thing.

And what happens when you get your information mostly from social media.  Or use A.I. intelligence to compose your emails or spit out a few bullet points about the most important issues of your world, or even of the day.

We don’t become illiterate but do lose the ability for any sort of “complex cognitive thinking.” And since reading a word, a phrase, or an entire book literally changes your brain, as experts report, then imagine what a steady diet of the wrong words, or the absence of anything new or meaningful, steers you towards.

And then couple that with what you actually see.  And HEAR. 

Or, well, choose to hear.

There is nothing wrong with being entertained.  We all have to escape and turn off the noise.

But do we want to lie back and solely have our brains fed by a machine that presents a skewed version of the world according to the way it has been programmed?

Do we want to mostly shut off deep thinking about the arts in favor of a poster board with a mere phrase like, say, KENNEDY CENTER DEMOLITION??

And when we get to listen clearly to a song in order to celebrate, will the pinnacle of what we HEAR as a victory tune really going to be YMCA on a loop?

I mean, I like The Village People as much as the next gay, but…..

WATCH the video, READ the words and really THINK about it.

The Village People – “YMCA”