This is a noisy world, a world of sensory excess, and this excess seems to expand its reach further and further with each passing day. Bit-by-bit, little slices of quiet and solitude are losing ground to auditory and visual intrusions bullying us for attention.

I’ve always felt that there was something peaceful and restorative about swinging into a gas station in the middle of the night during a long drive and standing outside your car in the chilled evening silence with only the wind and flow of fuel into the tank to be heard. There “was” something peaceful about it, but now a little screen on each pump shouts useless blather, competing with the equally unnecessary music blaring from the canopy above.

Is this assault on solitude necessary? Must we have the latest Hollywood gossip and political toilet bowl water splashed on us while Burt Bacharach assures us from the speakers above that “what the world needs now is love sweet love”? It’s too much. Too much of a lot of nothing that does nothing but contribute to the ever growing pile of uselessness we must constantly dig through to find that which is useful.

It doesn’t stop at the pump. You venture inside for some fluid relief, where Mr. Bacharach (who has a lovely voice) follows you into the restroom where more screens hang over each of the urinals rendering it pert near impossible to ponder all that is in need of pondering. The voices in my head find this loss of ponderable moments to be troubling. If my attention is elsewhere they only have each other to talk to as they voice their concerns over whether I’ll remember to grab a licorice whip and some pork rinds.

Who could have imagined this screen filled world years ago when the only screens we had were massive boulders in the corner of the living room pulling a few grainy channels from the airwaves (try hanging one of those behemoths above a urinal)? A world where “losing the remote” meant that none of the kids were within earshot to turn the knob between one of the three available channels. A world where “The Clapper” was a technological wonder.

For better or for worse, the world is, and always has been, in a perpetual state of change. I’m fine with that, I’m not a Luddite (fun word). I just think that we need to be a bit more cognizant of what disappears when something new appears. Gains generally don’t occur without loss, or as the band Cinderella prophesized “don’t know what you got till it’s gone”. Wisdom and luxurious heads of hair…some get it all. So it goes.

At long last the calendar claims spring is here, we have gained an hour…lost some sleep, and await winter to leave us be for a bit. Reminds me of one of my dad’s Faron Young records popping and cracking from the automotive sized hi-fi parked in our living room many Sundays ago “the seasons come, the seasons go”.