Awkward capture of a daily ritual I relish -- thought I'd write this down before the time period where I can't listen to loud music, due to my hybrid CI surgery coming up on Thursday. I will miss this.
One of the spaces I relish most -- in both physical space and the passage of time -- is driving alone in my car. It's just the right amount of extraneous stimuli for my mind to relax but still think about other things for an extended period. I like the whooshing of motion, the vision of the world whipping by. I'll often fall into prayer while driving, sometimes effortlessly (sometimes not). And without other people in the car, I get to turn my music on as loud as I want to play it.
My music is loud. Loud, loud loud. Probably the kind of loud that causes permanent hearing damage, except that I'm... already profoundly deaf, so that's about as loud as it has to be for me to hear it in the first place. If others are in the car, they turn the music down so that it's the right volume for them, and I can barely tell there's music there at all. Sometimes I don't even realize it's playing.
My mind tries to follow along in auditory imagination, grasping at wraiths hidden in the thrum of the motor, working hard to fill in the gaps. And I can do it, often -- I have a fantastic auditory imagination, far stronger without external cognition than my fragile capacity for visuals (if I don't close my eyes, focus hard, and/or sketch, I lose what I'm attempting to imagine). But it strains me, and I often give up. Alone in the car, it's my space and I can fill it with sound that I want.
Mornings and evenings when I commute, I'll fling the volume control out to the right, usually until the screen reads MAX and the rear and side view mirrors start to shudder with the pulse of bass. I nudge my left knee out to contact the door, where the speakers are built in. Each drum kick and each low bass hum pads through my leg; sometimes I raise my voice and blend into the sound. I'm now surrounded, swimming in a signal that's now deep enough for me to dive -- in reality, not only in imagination. That's what I miss; that's what I want. That's what I dance to, when I dance -- I dance to blues, a form of music soaked enough with bass that I can hear at volumes approximating someone hearing.
My car audio can be heard -- windows closed -- from across a gas station. My headphones can be heard -- with lyrics -- from across the room. My phone conversations, such as they are, are audible to everyone around me long before they're understandable to me (and barely so, without interpreting). But when I drive alone, it doesn't matter. It's my space to fill with sound, and so I do.