These Jaws Cannot Be Stopped

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Jul 03, 2024

Spring-loaded mandibles unleash a cavalcade of snapping syllables, like millions of mousetraps going off at once, teasing you with the cheese of knowledge or just being in-the-know. Your sanity is snapped in half, the spaghettification of your entrails throbbing in its death throes to the cacophonic clutter of Hell's in-house orchestra. The probability wave between shutting the hell up and saying something almost always collapses into saying something. It has to be done. The thing needs to be said. More accurately, the things need to be said. One and done is never sufficient. The prima materia of the world itself needs to be transduced into verbiage.

Why is it ok to blast someone's ears with your shit? I suppose I'm doing such a thing now. Hypocrisy? Somewhat.

Why only somewhat? Because you're reading this on your own volition. Hypocrisy is a thing of degree rather than of kind. Even silence's hottest cheerleader, Pythagoras, shook his pom-poms with the aid of speech. Thanks for reading, by the way. I'll be out of your space shortly. Pinky-promise.

Logorrhea—the unmitigated effluvium of words coming from a chatterbox's mouth.

People have the undying urge to talk.

And talk.

Fuck.

It doesn't stop. The political junkie browbeats me about The Debate. The religious couple-turned-marriage counselors give me unsolicited advice using Ephesians and Thessalonians. It doesn't matter that I didn't ask. Did I tell you that I just published a novel? I didn't. Sorry, I guess. I figured you didn't want to hear my braggadocio. Can't blame you.

Maybe it's just me. Again, hypocrite. Yeah, I tend to underspeak. But I sure as shit overwrite. I'm not any quieter. I'm just more insidious. Better? Probably not.

There's a new product among the government dole. Along with the welfare cheese and the food-stamp eggs and the WIC milk, there is—

—The Voice. Not the unwatchable (and unlistenable) television show, but the phenomenon of egalitarian loquacity. Yep. The Megaphone Emporium has a vinyl sign saying, “We accept EBT.”

Yet again, hypocrite. Substack is my cardboard paper towel tube transducing my pathos into your cochlea. I'm sorry you subscribed. No, I'm not. Hear me out.

In the car, I go on and on to my wife about the religious couple-turned-marriage counselors. “All three of their kids in the back seat of the car, while the sagacity ensued, had their faces lit by phones. And they want to give us advice?”

“No offense,” my daughter says from the back seat, “but you complain a lot.”

Should I reprimand her and reestablish who's boss? I don't. I sulk and take my tablespoon of truth. She's right.

“But I'm complaining about things one should complain about,” I say, laser-locking my point at her through the rear-view mirror. “And you're complaining about my complaining.”

Complaining about complaining. Now there's a John Barth metafiction novel I wish one of my heroes would have penned.

“You're one to talk,” my wife says to her. She's right. The Lil’ ‘Un has a rapid-fire cadence that's hard to keep up with. It could be anything from listing Sanrio characters (Hello Kitty, et al) to asking me how to say ‘Do you have any croissants?’ in French, to asking why dogs bark instead of speak (God bless dogs) to meditations on the monad.

If the 5th of November in England is Guy Fawkes Day, we should here in the rest of the world have a National Shut the Hell Up Day. On this day, this sacred day, this silent day, we not only be quiet, but we burn an effigy. The effigy is the Chatty Cathy. This Chatty Cathy need not always be a female. In fact, I think males shut the fuck up less than females. Mansplaining is real. I don't like identity politics, but we boys need to clam it up. It just never stops. We're experts on anything. How to remove gum from hair, how to coat your internet cable with plastic so that your wifi doesn't diminish in a storm, how to properly navagate the eighth bardo—

The Chatty Cathy is way more odious than the Guy Fawkes guy. Her rap sheet goes back centuries. The Chatty Cathy never tried gunpowdering a king's nose, but she did make her hapless listener miss freeway exits, botch rhinoplasties, and send unedited emails.

What if twenty hours of silence imparted just as much if not more wisdom than twenty hours of podcasts and Plato? I myself consume too much sound: music, podcasts (on history, the occult, health optimization, red-pill evolutionary psychology), boxing tutorials, YouTube vids on garage door repair, life-hacks from Pazuzu.

Why is it ok to slam my words into your tympanic membranes like a battering ram trying to breach a castle without your permission, but I'll kindly ask before laying an LSD tab on your tongue? Why is it ok to engage my catapults to propel my boulders of bullshit against your ramparts, but I'd never dare shove a bouquet under your nose without your consent?

The three smallest bones of the human body are to be found inside the ear canal. Their psi is not meant to undergo what they do. They receive worse weight than our lumbars. And they're not carbon fiber.

My cauliflower ear from jiu-jitsu has been exacerbated by those two organs not wanting to let anything more in. They're done. They've had it. They're closing up shop. Should I wear earbuds as deterrents? Should I stop being a nice guy? I need more silence.

The modern ear takes a disproportionate amount of abuse while the skin, tongue, nose, and eyes do a round-robin of high-fiving. Even gas station pumps are in on the noise pollution. When you slam the 87 Unleaded phallus into the Rav4's sphincter, Chive TV or some other saccharine video montage erupts into being like an eldritch digital daemon. Can't we huff our Techron fumes in peace?

Fake gangstas at red lights bump mumble rap with their car windows down. It's not that they're deaf; it’s that they want you to know what they listen to. That shit song is the soundtrack to their imagined awesomeness. Of course, he who knows the least boasts the most. Turn that shit off. Listen to some Italian stoner metal. Or Stravinsky.

It's third-party validation. It's peacocking. In fact all chatter is peacocking where the feathers are factoids, maxims, and witticisms. We, the listeners, are the peafowl—condemned to be harassed until the Kali Yuga comes, when the urge to inseminate with info is all used up.

Nickleback and Blind Melon melodies follow me from one building to the next. Bad tunes attach themselves to me better than my shadow does. If this happens just one more time, I'll believe in synchronicity. And contrary to popular opinion, synchronicity sucks.

The verticle storage of silence dwarfs the horizontal, linear inefficiency of speech. Silence is holographic, to be decoded by the laser of the quietened intellect.

The dudes who built the Tower of Babel did not get demoted for getting all uppity with their dialects—they got dropped because they thought they could talk their way to heaven. According to the ancient Kabbalistic text Sepher Yetzirah, the world was made from the twenty-two flame letters of the Hebrew alphabet.

Awesome. Just awesome. I’m not kidding. The concept of manifesting reality through language (which in turn is manifested through thought) is effing rad. But there are limitations. To wit:

Twenty-two layers of stone and twenty-two yods from which to fashion your phonemes get you positively stratospheric, but you're sorely mistaken if you think it gets you bottle service with Uriel and the boyz.

God be like, Naw, Bitch [Lightning crashes]!

So sshhh.

Thank you for reading Third-Eye LASIK. If you like what you just read, why not check out my brand-new novel? It’s an LA noir mystery with an alcoholic private detective, vegan crime bosses, guys who cut cocaine with borax, and AI Charles Manson.