Recently, when I was in class I was overcome with laughter when I realized that one of my classmates didn’t have the whispering gene. A really nice guy in general, he just never learned how to speak in any volume lower than “talk”. Inevitably there is going to be some whispering going on in class, it can’t be avoided, like fat people in Walmart. With this classmate, however, when he gets into a discussion with someone, everyone around him can hear his side of the conversation. The effect is as if there were nobody talking to him at all, and that he, in fact, is sitting at the back of class holding a conversation with himself. One would think that the teacher would then ask him to be quiet, but I think that his “quiet voice” is so over the top they just assume he’s addressing the class —and it must be important because nobody would not whisper in the middle of a lecture.
I emitted another burst of laughter when we were trying to put together the questions we would ask a war veteran in a face-to-face interview. This gem came from a very tall Dane who started rattling off suggestions including, “How has your adjustment been returning home?”, “Did you kill anybody?”, and, “Have you had an amputation?”
This last one, I couldn’t let go:
“Why not ask a blind vet how many fingers you’re holding up?”
“It’s a nice day, how about if we conduct the interview while jogging?”
“I know you’re mute, but could you speak up?”
“So when did you realize your face was missing?”
Under this barrage of elite witticism he plaintively asked, “What if they were amputated before they went to war?”
Really, is that Denmark’s drafting policy? “Welcome to the army son, you’ll be in the King’s 38th Division. They are primarily responsible for radio communication and being steady targets.”
To his credit, this Dane once noted that a particularly flamboyant plaid one of our classmates was wearing was from the clan McQueer.
(Generally I jot down little notes to remind myself to pick up on a topic. The notes for these last two anecdotes were “Whispering Wilson” and “Anders and the Amputee”, respectively. This makes me think that Whispering Wilson and Anders’ Amputees would be a good name for a bluegrass band.)
Directly outside of my front door there is a home for the mentally challenged. Well, not really a home, more a place where their parents store them for the day to free themselves up for work and regular day-type activities. From what I can tell it is a nice facility. The outside facade is the usual yellow brick (of which Aarhus is the number one producer, and consumer of, in Europe) with large windows which feature rooms filled with colourful things that the mentally challenged may enjoy; large balls, stuffed animals, plastic spoons. The outside of the one story complex has a large grass yard with a sandbox and swing-set. This is where I believe most of the howling is going on.
When I first moved here I couldn’t quite figure out what the sound was that was waking me up every weekday morning. It sounded vaguely human, but could it be some obscure Danish wildlife I’ve never heard of like the European polecat (which would probably be a great name for an Winnipeg strip club), or an elk? It only took one day off for me to glance out my kitchen window and say to myself, “Huh. Those are retards howling out there.”
No, the language I use to speak to myself is not always politically correct. Is yours? If so, why?
It’s not that they were being beaten, or abused, or anything. As a matter of fact, judging by some of the staff at the facility, one might seriously considered blagging their way in to get a bit of the club-med treatment. It’s clearly an above the board operation. Granted, evil lurks in unlikely places, and they may have a damp, ugly, basement where they tease the mentally disabled with name-calling or Sudoku, but I doubt it. This is, after all, Denmark; a place that has really only been successful in being nasty to Muslims. And in that case they were pretty (though naively) shocked by the screaming vitriol created by a single cartoon.
It seems the clientele of this particular establishment —mere feet from my front door— are howling just for the hell of it. Sort of heralding in the new day like reveille, or a rooster.
The evenings pose a different problem. On the other side of my house is another row of houses. These houses contain the business students going to my University. Being a post-grad student of Journalism I am not privy to their exact class schedule but it seems like their course load is made up of a single 15 minute lecture a week that occurs sometime in the late evening. This frees them up for other activities, like drinking heavily and yelling at each other across the courtyard. When the weather is too cold to yell at each other across the courtyard they go to each other’s houses and yell at each other indoors. Just to set the record straight, these are ALL very nice people, so the yelling that occurs is of the friendly variety. Also, the yelling is somewhat of a necessity, otherwise they wouldn’t be able to hear each other over the dance music.
I have no problems with good dance music, but here’s the thing about it; you can hear dance music long before it actually arrives. This can be illustrated by people that blast dance music in their cars. Standing near a road (or several kilometres away from it) the steady sub-audio thump of the bass can be heard for quite a while before you see the Honda Civic playing it — which is inevitably souped-up with tinted windows, black lights, a whale fin, and a tool in the driver’s seat. You know the scene, and it promotes all kinds of hatred towards it. Assuming you ignore the fact that it works as a fairly good indicator that a jack-ass is approaching. Sort of a cowbell for douchebags.
The effect is somewhat more authentic when the dance music is coming from your neighbour’s house, and the walls between you are made of rice paper. The steadily pounding electronic bass drum is a visceral sensation you more feel than hear. The feeling is like having your head inside of a steadily pounding bass drum, or having your rib-cage regularly tazed. This is a slightly tricky situation for me for a number of reasons. The first is that my neighbour is a super guy. In fact he has an edge on most other French people because he plays, and enjoys, ice hockey. For somebody who has never left North America to understand the incongruity of this; it’s like a new parent not posting several terabytes worth of baby pictures on facebook, or a ‘Women of M.A.D.D. Erotic Calendar’. The second is that I partied too. In fact, they are me about 10 years ago (no truer thing can be said, considering they are the age I was ten years ago) so I understand the general excitement: new place, new people, all with different accents and backgrounds, no parents dragging you down with boring rules, like “Don’t pass out in the street” and, “Overall volume below the decibel level of canon fire”. I had fun, and they’re having fun, and good for all of us. In light of that, their carousing doesn’t inspire the kind of hatred that would have me on the lawn in a bathrobe with a shotgun. Besides, when I ask them to keep it down, they do, and there are no hard feelings. And it’s not as if I haven’t been complained to for the very same thing due to guitar-playing with a few of them early in the morning.
In the end, all it really means is that retards wake me in the morning, and then put me to bed at night.
