Most afternoons I spend alone, sitting around my house reading or doing the crossword, listening to music on the stereo. Today I walked to the kitchen and made coffee on the stove with my Bialetti coffee maker, and used a small pot to boil some milk. I selected tracks on Winamp to make the coffee to, and empty out the dishwasher as well. The tracks I selected were from The Darkness, Ms. Dynamite, Ludacris and Kanye West. I retreated then to the porch to drink the coffee and read White Noise by Don Delillo for the second time, then grew bored and came in here to write.

I was idly reminiscing about being at a Tossers concert in Chicago a couple weeks ago. As I listened to the intensely loud music, I wondered to myself about sound, how great and mysterious it is. Sometimes if sound is really loud you can say something out loud, something that you're deeply ashamed of, or some kind of personal secret that you never want anyone to know, and no one will know. A loud concert is like a confession booth if you want it to be, and I've used it as such. Sometimes music seems so loud that it seems as though it could cancel out other senses, like smell in particular. Yet all of those other senses were there at the concert despite the overwhelming sound: I could smell cigarette smoke and sweat and could taste my Guinness.