Growing up I always fell asleep listening to something. This proved to be a bit of a challenge. Not only do I have hearing loss but my mom can hear a flea fart on the neighbor’s dog.
My boombox was out because I couldn’t get the speaker close enough to hear it at a volume low enough that wouldn’t alert my mom.
My walkman was out because I sleep in the fetal position and that would press one of the headphone cans painfully into one ear and cause the other can to levitate.
Then I found little speakers that plugged into the headphone jack of my walkman. So my walkman was back in.
I would set the walkman on my nightstand, plug the speakers in, wrap the cord around my bedpost, and tuck the speaker between the post and the mattress. For my next trick I’d find a volume that I could hear (sorta) but my mom couldn’t. This meant I needed to figure out what, exactly, to play. My walkman had a radio but the commercials were always MUCH LOUDER than the music. Plus, I didn’t know what songs would come on. Having Enter Sandman start blaring wouldn’t be conducive to sleep. So I settled on comedy albums.
I would rotate George Carlin and Jeff Foxworthy.
I knew their albums well enough that I didn’t need to hear every word they spoke. And, for the most part, they didn’t scream like Denis Leary or Sam Kinison, so I wouldn’t be jerked out of a doze. The only thing I couldn’t control was how fast I fell asleep. If I took too long, then I’d be startled by the clicking of the play button popping out as the side finished.
Apart from the occasional audience applause, there were no background noises for me to sift through. Carlin would talk about finding a place for his stuff or Foxworthy would talk about the redneck ABCs and I’d only have to listen to their voices.
I’d always listen to a new album during the day and I’d not put it into the rotation until I’d listened to it a few times. Their voices were ones that I’d been exposed to enough times that I knew how they formed their phonemes. So the active listening wasn’t as strenuous. Still, the new material would always present words I’d not heard before. So It’d take a few days-worth of listening for me to know enough of the routine by heart for me to popped the tape in as I curled up for the night.
It wasn’t until I got hearing aids and could stream the albums directly into them that I realized I’d always been hearing certain things wrong. A word here, an entire bit there, I knew I wasn’t catching it all and it was fun to listen to the old albums and pick up what I missed. Sometimes, though, applause would defeat even the might powers of Bluetooth. For those parts, I’d have to watch the special with captions. Which was another long wait. I still run across old DVDs that are captionless and some shows aren’t streaming.
But that’s a blog for another day.
I stopped listening to albums while falling asleep when I went away to college. But into my teen years, it was always relaxing to hear someone talking to me as I fell asleep. I don’t know why. Perhaps it was my nascent tinnitus. The first time I was visited by the vile villain was when I was fourteen. And then he stayed for but a day before going away. Or did he? I wonder if this habit was to drown out the faint susurrus of tinnitus.
Just because I’m deaf,
doesn’t mean I don’t like sound.
I have favorites.
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