I am sitting at the Cafe Rath with tears streaking my eyes. I'm not being emotional-my ears are in some type of psychic pain. Through the night giant diesel trucks gnawed at my dreams, driving my cochleae towards my spine. I need someone to pull on my arms to withdraw my shoulders from my ears. Somewhere around dawn, if Linz was a place that dawn ever came, hovering as it does in a grey industrial haze, someone started dropping long steel rods outside my window and in some type of sonic premonition I decided to drop the pretense of sleep. This impulse was answered by a hammer drill to the outside wall of my room. Persistent, as if exploring a giant cavity in a cement tooth. Like an actual toothache, it accompanied my reading and emails, but unlike a toothache I left it behind. It proved to be two early birds with a smallish portable jackhammer removing cement at the base of the wall of my apartment.

With a nervous system still ringing from pre-dawn assault, navigating the city on foot was like being a sitting duck in an acoustical shooting gallery. Or perhaps more like a snail with no shell trying to cross a snare drum during a drum solo- you do your best but you're waiting for the blow to fall. And it does----

--Ear level blasts of air brakes from a construction truck trigger my amygdala to release a suite of chemicals in my bloodstream and brain, a burst of adrenalin, a jolt of flight or fight useless on this street, in this time-score 150 points. Chased up the street by a slow moving garbage truck, 50. Take it personally, ad 50 points. Red light turns green releasing 120 dB howls of power madness, only soft human absorber on street, score 200. Pushed into plaza wall by backup truck, score 80. Turn onto quiet side street, relax guard, extend psyche 15%, further relax and on cue, TILE SAWS sever the corpus collosum or at the very least light up the audio cortex like a pinball win as the brain madly scrambles for a filter that can manage this new and tragic assault on the nerves, the psychic compressors madly pumping away to manage potential high frequency loss, fear of high frequency loss, fear of loss of selfhood as those wide open ear canals mentally slam down invisible lead shutters. The noise suddenly stops revealing in freeze frame, like a flash photo of the ocean deep, normal life on a small side street of Linz as if nothing whatever happened at all. Two men talking on the street. Are they stark raving deaf? Not a twinge or even a tick to register 110dB of focused harsh spike waves at 1,700 to 3,500 cycles per second. Perhaps they have been here long enough to loose those frequencies, but if so what are they doing so relaxed on the street, reading lips?

During the lull as my psychic compressor opens up to the sounds of the surrounding, shuffle of footsteps, door squeak, distant voices, commuter traffic, come swimming up out of focus seeking to replace the gaping hole in the soundscape left by the saw's assault. With comic timing, just as normality is about to be established, some equilibrium of volume and distance that can be walked through, navigated as an intact human without putting on a mental football helmet of automatic neglect for that inborn sense of hearing, connecting to the splendid world beyond the radius of the skull, knowing your place in that world, that world that exists as connected to and responding to you--WHAM. The tile saw again. This time mentally cutting the nerves just below the skull. The perimeter of my sense world makes a hasty withdrawal from the world around and climbs as far back up into my spinal chord as it can. When I enter the coffee shop I'm not in 'physical pain' but tears are streaming down my face.

And now, after ordering a second chocolate to enjoy in the relative acoustical safety of Fritz Rath's house of fine pastries and Hapsburg Memorabilia, I find myself dawdling, unwilling to leave. It’s not just the sweet chocolate warmth on a cold grey day. It's also an exoskeleton against the acoustic madness that reigns outside. Outside where the tile saw waits.

BAD JOKE

Well, if that’s the way you feel and assuming this experience is real and you are indeed bombarded by the sounds of transport, cars, trucks, industry-you fear walking through it will feel like a snail on a snare drum what is the best shell you can use for protection?
HA HA HA HA! "A Car!" HA HA HA HA HA.