We are The Brothers Frank.

Noise

I see much in Manhattan I’d rather not.  Litter, for instance, which, come to think of it, I also smell.  It’s at least hard to hear litter, unlike  taxi brakes squealing and subway trains arriving and paranoid schizophrenics and the rest of New York’s Sounds Of The Morning.  I hear in other towns they’ve got bird song.

Call any sensory input you wish you didn’t have to deal with “noise”.  Noise is a problem, one that, like most problems, has at least two solutions; and one of those solutions is dumb.

You don’t want to go walking down the street blindfolded in earplugs hoping for a quiet sensory experience.  You’ll get run over, or you’ll walk right by Björk in the West Village and nearly not notice.  (This has happened to me.)  (Not the getting run over bit.  The bit with Björk.)

You don’t want to dull your senses.  They get duller all by themselves with age, thanks very much.

Instead you want to be very careful about which parts of your sensory experience you attend to.  You can ignore, for instance, most of what’s on the internet.  You can also ignore most of what my little brother says, you can ignore W.M. Akers altogether, and you can ignore the ConEd machinery cutting up the road outside my apartment.  At least, you could if it weren’t so loud and irregular and awful.

You could, I suppose, get all worked up about stuff like this and demand everyone cease their noisemaking, but you almost always lose these fights, not least because the people you’re fighting with can’t hear you.  Practice ignoring; see how it feels.

TV news?  Gone.  “Networking”, in the sense that involves being nice to people you don’t like so they might give you something you probably don’t really want anyway?  Gone.  Street canvassers?  Gone.  (I gave up on street canvassers when one from Greenpeace tried to convince me that folks like me are “literally the backbone” of their organization.)

Careful, though, that you don’t ignore the good stuff.  I considered lumping untruths with Greenpeace canvassers and TV news, on the grounds that untrue sentences can’t help but be noisy.

But here are two stories, one true, one false.  I leave it to you to decide which is noisier.  (And, while you’re at it, which is true.)

Today I had lunch with a friend I hadn’t seen in too long, worked, then played in a small park with another friend I hadn’t seen in not-quite-but-almost-too long.  In the park you can get from the bodega to the edge of the asphalt in just four steps.  Well, I can do it in four steps.  It took my friend five.

Today I bought four umbrellas and opened them over a subway grate.  The next train to pass brought a pressure wave with it, which carried me fifteen stories into the air.  I floated haphazardly down toward my favorite street vendor and, on landing, ordered coffee and an egg sandwich, which he insisted on giving to me for free since I was his only customer today to fly into line.