TOTALLY WIRED

Recently, you would have found me cross-legged and forlorn in front of our junk drawer, sifting through a sea of wires. Wires. Blech. I shudder to even type it! (NB: “Type” is a bit of a misnomer here, as I’m currently beta-testing a VR app that lets me dance my words into being. Despite the sweating, it works a treat!) My hab-keeping had unearthed a crypt of connections past, a potter’s field of dangles and dongles long decommissioned. This is how we used to live, I thought glumly, striding with my armful of cables and chargers to the local e-shredder.
But as I watched the machine’s brawny cable-rending teeth munch happily upon its new meal, I admit that I brightened. You see, electronic recycling is a rackety business—yet for me its gnashing made no more than the faintest hum, swaddled as I was in the cloudlike embrace of my headphones’ noise-canceling technology. My grin widened. This was a moment I live for: when our wirebound limitations give way to freedom.
Our world is ever surging forward, but progress is less linear than it is convulsive. With technology as with society at large, we gather and gather, then suddenly spring. Welcome as these quantum leaps are, they can be taxing as well. So much Big is happening, your faithful scribe has come to treasure the Small. Noise cancellation is paramount, not because it shuts the world out but because it helps bring us the calm needed to connect with what that noisy world makes possible—its people, its art, its urgency. To burrow into beauty, to nuzzle the now.
Years ago I scoffed at these devices as the refuge of the weary traveler, a way for rumpled suits to numb the claustrophobic roar of their tin-can surroundings, opiates of illusory isolation. Today’s versions, though—quite the opposite! Thanks to the wonders of active noise cancellation, they are built to carve cocoon from cacophony. Inverted sound waves strip away the wind and chatter of your environment; more refined modulation of low-end frequencies minimizes the “eardrum suck” sensations of generations past. The result is phone conversations that haven’t felt this intimate since the last time we cradled a receiver next to our ear and whispered with a teenage crush, cord coiled around our finger, feet tracing idle lines on the bedroom wall. When
I need to be alone, there’s no focus like the one found inside an ambient soundscape, my favorite ASMR humming along, productivity scrolling out before me.
Speaking of which, friends, I have chores to complete. Now that the junk drawer has been purged, it’s time your humble narrator gathers and springs to the next item on what my habmate calls a “Ripley-do list.” That VR headset isn’t going to dry itself, you know. Thanks for listening.

SILENTLY YOURS,
RIPLEY D. LIGHT

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NitroFlare

• Airspeed Magazine – September 2020
• The Family Handyman – September 2020