Years ago, a friend suggested that movies should be watched while wearing HQ headphones. More immersive will the film become, and you’ll notice additional auditory details, as the explanation went. Her words resonated, yet brought little impact, for I lacked decent headphones and being tethered to the film in such a tangible way seemed like it would be intrusive.
Eventually I transitioned to Bluetooth noise-canceling headphones and found myself streaming films as I cooked or performed various household activities. While my commitment to the movie lacked the observational commitment promoted by the friend, with this device my adherence to her suggestion skyrocketed. Sensory stimulation became rich, sonorous, even if life activities vied for my attention. Then, I set up a passable surround-sound stereo system and found myself delighting like a child mesmerized by some new facet of existence each time a noise traveled across the room or originated from behind or beside me rather than from the visual stimulant before my eyes. Really, each time an explosion or voice or anything of the like plays via a rear speaker, I find myself giddy.
Lately, I’ve been listening to a couple of QCODE podcasts, The Left-Right Game (TLRG) and Blackout. When TLRG released several weeks ago, I hadn’t heard of QCODE. A blog I follow mentioned the release, so I investigated it, and discovered it to be a modern-day incarnation of a radio play. One episode a week to occupy a short run would be a worthwhile addition to the queue of things to listen to while running. I suppose that the first episode intrigued me enough that I downloaded Blackout as well, finding the summary of its plot to be a fine addition to the limbo that social distancing invokes. TLRG begins with a warning that is also somewhat of an advertisement for Sonos, a sponsor of QCODE. Basically, each episode warns you to be mindful that TLRG provides an immersive-sound experience, that noises may startle or confuse you. Appropriately enough the first episode includes noises of a car crash, and at the same moment, an ambulance came down the road with its sirens blaring, synchronized events across podcast and life. Hearing the ambulance before seeing it, I had reminded myself: it’s just the podcast, to discover that, no, it wasn’t simply the podcast that I had heard.
TLRG has a strong horror element to it. Given the relatively quiet streets, and the general state of unease populating our world given COVID-19, dark thoughts sometimes creep into mind. I imagine how different periods spent outside might be were zombies or aliens or general warfare have overtaken us rather than this disease. Going outside would be less safe, in rather dramatic fashions. I often contemplate danger. A source of this paranoia arising from having grown up with the DC Sniper being at large, and generally being terrified by the reckless monstrosity of mass shootings. These societal calamities likely magnified something innate and nascent that had been within me since birth, for even as a small child walking to the bus stop, I would conjure scenarios of bullets from people and laser beams from antennae atop houses streaming at me, alongside options as to dodge or combat these assailants.
Thus, it’s not surprising that as the podcast played, I anticipated a bullet streaking down from any of the surrounding Pentagon City buildings toward me. I spied options for cover, ways to maximize my odds of survival. With so many gun nuts, and the increasing numbers of their kind, as this disease situation magnifies, along with it peoples’ growing inability to obtain required resources, perhaps violence will explode into our daily consciousness. People are always the most terrible sources of mayhem in nearly every post-apocalyptic tale, for we run off of emotions and lack the cognitive discipline to turn down other avenues, and engrained in our culture is this notion that we must do anything to protect our immediate kind while recognizing that for this goal anything goes, and that, in turn, each person out there surely behaves similarly, thus every atrocity we inflict is simply us averting a similar one in kind that would had been turned toward us, ourselves, otherwise.
As with the headphones suggestion my friend had shared, it seems that the more you enhance your ears to the world, the greater the vibrations you can sense, even if their source is mainly simply your head within. And as I listen to this podcast, thoughts of books like the Parable of the Sower, The Road, Station 11, among others play out in my mind, and I’m practicing agility training as I run, though I know the true cause, and it’s born not from a need of the moment, but a desire to get myself ready for when the shit truly does become the daily road upon which we tread.