BOSE HEADPHONES
It is magic. I just sit here in the corner of my room and the whole world comes to me. Yesterday it was Bose earphones that transformed my world. They are usually $379 and beyond reach, but last week they appeared for $120 off and I bought them. Today I am listening to Bach Essentials and am in heaven.
You’ve seen the equivalent, those white cylinders protruding from people’s ears as they walk down the street. In the old days if someone was babbling to themselves as they walked down the street we would think they were nuts. I am babbling to myself as I type right now, but I keep it quiet. Whether people think I’m nuts or not I don’t know. I don’t know if everyone talks to themselves as I am doing right now. But I’m guessing some people do. I can sit here all day talking to myself and be quite content as I tap in the words on the keyboard. I don’t know where the words come from. They appear on the page in complete sentences, sometimes in complete thoughts. Where they come from I don’t know, it is as if someone is talking to me and I am just writing it down. Where that hidden person’s ideas come from in complete sentences I don’t know. I just listen and hear every word as it appears on the page, I am just a spectator.
But now I am a spectator that is listening to Bach Essentials and at the same time listening to the words as they appear on the screen in front of me. If I were listening to a podcast at the same time I couldn’t be also dictating. I can’t listen to two voices at once. But apparently I can listen to Bach and listen to this inner voice at the same time, in fact Bach lifts my spirits and makes writing easier.
Of course, it would be nice to be Bach. Because I am guessing he can do the same thing but in the opposite way. He just sits back and an inner something brings him these glorious sounds and he just writes them down, scribbles them down because the music in all its parts comes to him so fast. He doesn’t know where the sounds are coming from either, but he hears them and scribbles them down not wanting to lose a note. But his hands would be busy writing down his music so he couldn’t be writing down another voice whispering in his ear at the same time.
Anyway, these new Bose earphones are marvelous. I can listen to Bach and write at the same time and there could be a dozen people in the room and they wouldn’t hear a thing. Here I am listening to Bach and scribbling down the words that come from somewhere and except for my fingers moving it looks as if I am half asleep or lost in thought, which I am, word thoughts and music thoughts.
And of course how this happens is miraculous as well. Noise cancelling shuts out the rest of the world. And where the sounds come from is almost as mysterious as where Bach’s sounds come from. How can the bass be so deep when the earphones are so tiny. I thought a deep bass required a great big woofer. But somehow everything is getting smaller and smaller. I used to have Apple AirPods 2, and they were really tiny. They are the ones sticking out of people’s ears with a little white cylinder as they appear to babble to themselves as they walk down the street. They are noise cancelling, too, and when you listen to music you are in your own world. And they have a deep bass, too, somehow. But for me they were too tiny. On the way to Paris in January I was in my own private world with my AirPods in my ears shutting out the noise of the plane as I listened to music and slept through the night. But in the morning they were gone. I searched everywhere but they had dropped out at some point after the music stopped playing, maybe in the bathroom, maybe in the aisle, but they were gone. Someone who cleaned the plane is sitting in his own world listening to music right now or babbling with a friend as he walks down the street with my white AirPods in his ear. These new Bose earphones are large enough they won’t drop out or get lost.
And of course the way the music gets here from the concert hall to my ear is miraculous as well. I know that somehow the sound is a computer mix of 1’s and 0’s or something like that. It seems impossible. Noise cancellation, hearing some sounds and not others, seems impossible. And bluetooth which I don’t understand at all means no wires. The music isn’t even on my phone. It is on a cloud somewhere and on that cloud is all of the world’s music or as much as I will ever be able to listen to, all courtesy of Apple to whom I pay a monthly fee. I don’t store 78’s or LP’s or CD’s. I don’t store anything and have everything. It is magic, pure magic. Talk about faith in what you can’t see which is the height of religious experience, all you can feel is a power that fills you, well Bose headphones do the same with music. I have faith and I am brought to life as are all those people who walk down the street in a daze with white things sticking out of their ears. You may do the same, not if you are eighty, you wouldn’t be caught dead with those things sticking out of your ears of you are eighty, but if you are twenty you would feel naked without them and the bubble they put you in.
So that is my revelation for the day.
BILLYBABA’S WANDERING 