LIKE POISON TO MY EARS--

Alright, so get this: It’s Thursday night, and I’m about ready to go for my nightly (well kind of, sometimes, nightly run) when I hear it—“Are you ready to rock boys,” then bang, ba, ba, bang, and a raspy voice of what I could only safely predict came from a sixty-five year old chain smoker starts busting out the infamous classic rock jam, “Johnny Be Good.” It’s like death to my ears, rising up over the mountain…the shear tone, the very essence, ugh, the sound! Where is it coming from?
We have a very “trendy” restaurant in town. Now when I say trendy, I am referring to the mid-forties and early fifty-year-old’s dating hotspot. It is a rather quant restaurant on the corner of my ridiculously small town, and the middle aged folk flock like cattle herding toward their lunch. The women put on their racy tops, that probably should have been traded in for something a bit more modest for a mom, and the men put on their coolest belt buckles to try and hide their rapidly increasing stomachs, and they all march down to this semi-classy joint to drink way too much, eat way to little in relationship to the inflated price, and look as smashing as they can possibly pull off--and tonight happened to be band night.
Seeing that I live on a hill about 3 minutes from this night club for the middle-age, the summer winds grace me with the opportunity to hear the glorious ballads, sung by who knows who. After hearing the fragmented “Johnny Be Good” and a very sad rendition of “La Bamba” I became thoroughly convinced that the band was not even required to audition prior to playing there, and they quite possibly were doing this horrendous act of singing entirely for free; because I have no idea who would fund such a noise, but could rather see the tables turned, and the band paying the restaurant to become exposed. And let me inform you—they were exposed, to almost an extent of exploitation as that noise found its way unexplainably loud infesting my home and the residences of surrounding neighbors. There was nowhere to hide, just THAT sound, and the faint remembrance of the crickets that, in truth, should be all I was hearing on this breezy summer evening.
In closing, let me put it this way, if I was paying the electric bill, the windows would be shut an extra two hours, the air would be on, and the sound of Leroy McGee, or whoever the heck is singing his lungs out down there, would drown away. And if anyone complained to me about the effects of using the air-conditioning for so long during an energy crisis, I would simply play them a sample of that noise, and let me tell you, they would understand.