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Really enjoyed reading this in the white noise injected quiet of my bedroom. My neurologist recently asked me if my headaches made me sensitive to noise, light, or scents. I had to explain that I am sensitive to all those things all the time, but that pain, in general, makes me lose my ability to keep my gloves on for the experience. So…the answer to her question was…maybe? She cocked her head to the side and wrote me a script for muscle relaxants. Sure…why not?

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I feel your pain Ashley. I regard gangster rap on a boom box as mass assault with a deadly weapon, punishable by firing squad. No, wait a minute. Too much noise. Um, lethal injection.

I imagine you're familiar with "Schopenhauer's law", my favorite philosophical proposition. "You may reliably estimate a given man's intelligence in inverse proportion to how much noise he makes or can stand to hear". Americans are serial offenders. To end the urban cacophony, I moved to a place in California so rural the UPS man has to walk the last half-mile to my door with a machete.

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I take solace in Schopenhauer's assessment. I must be a freaking genius!

And yes, Americans are particularly enamored of loudness. I'm hit with it as soon as I land in a US airport: wall of TV audio, cell phone video, and endless yakking. It's another factor in my diagnosis of Americans as being addicted to the anxiety their culture liberally distributes. Quiet is always box office poison in Hollywoodland.

(As for gangster rap, you haven't lived until you've indulged in daily doses of the massively autotuned, monotonously repetitive Turkish hiphop the neighbor kids around here enjoy.)

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