Dec. 8: Quiet time is over

The quietest place on Earth is an anechoic chamber in Minneapolis. The room was engineered to eliminate echoes (anechoic is latin for without echo) and, when you measure the sound level inside, actually registers in the negative. That means that the room isn't just completely silent, it absorbs noise. Seriously, lock yourself in there for the night and you will be able to hear your own heart beating and the blood thundering in your pulse.

Most people who spend any time in there can't wait for quiet time to be over. The record, apparently, is 45 minutes. When the lights are off, the room lends itself to a feeling of intense claustrophobia. Sitting in pitch blackness, all sounds muted with no reverb, makes people feel like they're in coffins.

I dunno... but I suspect a deaf person could break that record.

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There is also an anechoic chamber at Brigham Young University. The university's namesake probably would have regularly spent time in that room, seeing as how he had 55 wives and 59 children. I guess the chicks dig dudes who look like this...

Brigham Young is also the subject of one of the most disturbing charts I've ever seen. To wit:

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If Brigham Young were alive today, I wonder if he would agree to go on one of those celebrity roast thingees. Norm Macdonald would have a heyday with him. "Brigham Young has 55 wives, which means that, on average, he has to spend 43 minutes each day talking to each of them about their feelings."

Polygamy. Sounds good in theory. Hell in practice. I think Abraham would have backed me up on that.

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There was a time when I could be assured of some quiet time when my kid was at my house. When he was a baby or a toddler, he would sleep or play quietly. Now he is a rambunctious seven-year-old who stays up past midnight and spends 87% of his spare time jumping on me bed, mostly after climbing onto my shoulders while I am writing note-a-day.

I expect I'll need a new spinal cord by this time next year.

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I'm going to talk about Alice Cooper now. He keeps coming up in note-a-day and now the muse wants me to bring him up again. So I will. 

In 1978, Alice Cooper released From the Inside, a concept album about the people Alice (nee Vincent Furnier) met while being treated for alcoholism in a New York institution. From the Inside is one of my favourite albums of all time. I discovered it in high school and it's been in the soundtrack of my life ever since. This is strange since I've never been an alcoholic or been institutionalized, but there was a time in my teenaged years when I felt like I should be. I wouldn't have been able to explain why I felt that way back then but I can tell you why now. It's because then I would have gotten the attention that I felt I deserved.

One of the songs on From the Inside is called The Quiet Room, which is about a man who attempted suicide. Here are some of the lyrics, which were written, in part, by Bernie Taupin, who also wrote the lyrics to Elton John's Goodbye Yellow Brick Road.

The California air
Your nightgown on the stairs
I remember every night
Scenes from home in the Quiet Room

How long have I been gone
Did winter kill the lawn
And all those polaroids you sent
Are on the wall in the Quiet Room

They've got this place
Where they've been keeping me
Where I can't hurt myself
I can't get my wrists to bleed
Just don't know why
Suicide appeals to me

The Quiet Room
Is sterilized and white
It's like a tomb
With just a moth stained naked night

Yeah, so The Quiet Room isn't a feel good song but that imagery jazzed me so much that, when my Grade 11 creative writing teacher asked us to analyze a piece of writing that we found particularly alluring, I chose The Quiet Room.  My teacher gave me a failing grade, saying that The Quiet Room wasn't appropriate because she didn't want to promote the idea of suicide to anyone in the class. As such, I did not finish at the top of my class and that meant that I didn't win the creative writing trophy at my school that year and I was angry about it then and I am still angry about it 30 years later.

One day, I hope to tell Alice Cooper that story. Alice Cooper is an Aquarius. So is my sister. 

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