How late did you end up staying Sat. night? That place was too loud.

“Saturday night we were there until the place closed and they kicked us out. So my “secret” (not really, because I’m always eager to share/commiserate with people if they seem interested, because I don’t know how folks in general can go to clubs/bars/concerts with music/etc. frequently and not have major hearing loss given the volume at which stuff is usually played) is that I (almost) always use earplugs. If you get these particular cheap green foam ones from Sav-On or Rite-Aid, you can cut or bite (which is harder) off the tips, and then they don’t stick out of your ears and look silly. Easy to put in and take out. You didn’t even notice I had them. Works just as well. Everything becomes nice and quiet (although in somewhat of a muffled sense), and you still feel the bass as before, if that’s your thing. And you complain even though the inherent (earplug-less) volume of sound in this club seemed (to me at least) to not be nearly as loud as many places I’ve been to, which puts things in a minor bit of perspective. I should carry around extras because you’re far from the first friend who’s complained about things being too loud– see, it’s not that we’re crotchety old people complaining about the volume of the movie (“back when I whuz a boy… our movies were silent!”), it’s that I intensely dislike the sensation of ringing in my ears the next day, of things sounding weird and muffled; sounds like the jangling of keys, or running water, or even regular old music don’t sound quite right; what’s disconcerting (no pun intended) is knowing that although eventually hearing will return to close to normal, it’ll never quite be 100% normal… maybe 99.9% of what it was before, at best, but given that I enjoy listening to (normal volume) music, why accumulate that hearing loss, little by little, every time I go out to a place like this, when I can have the best of both worlds and enjoy the other aspects of typically loud venues, but in my own, quiet(er) world? Value your hearing.”

Another possibility, here, is that my ears are a little bit more sensitive to volume than others’. But I tend to think that I am physiologically rather normal.