"I'm Sorry. Did You Say Something?"

I’ve been informed that I don’t listen or pay attention very well. I can’t recall who said it, when or what the circumstances were, but they were pissed. I’m fairly certain it was my wife, as I know she talks a lot but I’m at a loss in regards to the content of her discussions. Women should know this by now about men; if a woman is in direct competition for her man’s attention with a televised sporting event, she will lose…and lose big. To gain my undivided attention, the T.V. should be not only turned off but dismantled into several hundred pieces and placed on the washing machine. This guarantees my attentiveness, as I avoid the laundry room at all costs and I have trouble assembling a sandwich, let alone a Samsung high-def. Making eye contact, yelling and fixing hold firmly on my shirt collar with clenched fists is another way to win my consideration. It’s not that I can’t remember things, as I recall, and recite, obscure movie quotes from countless R-Rated comedies, can talk at length about baseball history and I have an enviable knowledge of all things Brady Bunch. Like most men, the problem must be in the exchange of information from our ears to our brain.

There are 3 pockets of dead space in the male brain that we can’t control, even though outside stimulus persuades us to act properly, we just can’t make the connection. First, is our inability to show good judgment and timing when scratching/adjusting our “plumbing”, if you will. It’s in our nature to insure the comfort and whereabouts of these tools at all times. Whether it’s standing out in right field during a softball game, giving a eulogy at a funeral or making a big presentation at work, we know it’s improper but you’re sure to find us tugging, shifting or tenting for air, our groinal regions. Second, is our refusal to replace the empty toilet paper roll. And really, why should we, when there’s a box of Kleenex sitting right behind us on the toilet tank lid, cotton balls in the cabinet or in a real pinch, a hefty supply of Q-Tips, all within reach and fully capable of getting the job done. Lastly, is our unwillingness to remember what’s being told to us when the T.V. is on. My wife claims I have “selective hearing.”

It’s not selective hearing. I’ve been blessed with the ability to screen out spoken information which requires me to remember a date/time, exert myself physically, clean something or anything that has to do with decorating. In fact, I have perfect hearing or at least I thought I did until the other day. A sound in the house frustrated and perplexed me in a way I hadn’t experienced since my youth.

When I was 10, I vividly remember sitting in my family room on a hot summer evening, only to have my T.V. viewing disturbed by the chirping of a lone cricket hidden somewhere in my midst. It’s amazing how loud a noise 1 cricket can make. Like a kitten playing with a ball of string, finding this cricket presented me with a new adventuresome game. This proved to be more difficult than I had expected. In the insect world, the cricket is what we refer to as a ventriloquist, without the scary looking wooden dummy, as the weight of this prop would surely crush a cricket and most crickets don’t have hands to properly operate a dummy. As soon as I heard a chirp, I rushed over to where I thought the sound originated, only to be mocked by a follow up chirp coming from the other side of the room. This went on for an hour; listen, chirp, run, adjust my winkie, watch some T.V., snack on some Fiddle-Faddle, repeat. Eventually, the cricket tired of the game and hopped out onto the floor. I ran over and placed my tennis shoe over his body. I tried to muster the courage to squish the little bastard but the crunching sound of an insect’s exoskeleton has always given me the heebie-jeebies. So I scooped it up with fistful of toilet paper, took it out to the garage and threw it into the first big spider web I saw. Once again, the circle of life was set in motion as God had intended. Boy sees cricket. Boy corrals cricket with a catcher’s mitt fashioned from Charmin toilet paper. Boy slings cricket into spider web to its’ ultimate doom. I had silenced the annoying sound which interrupted my T.V. viewing and the other day, my hearing skills were once again, put to the test.

A single beep from an unknown place in our home, nearly caused me to lose my mind. Like most people, we have roughly 87 smoke detectors dispersed throughout our house. When the battery runs low on one of these detectors, it emits an annoying chirp, like the cricket, that is impossible to find with the human ear. I was up in our bedroom when I heard the first chirp. It sounded like it came from across the hall in the guest room. When I got in the guest room, I positioned myself under the smoke detector and stared upward for what seemed like an hour. Then I heard the chirp again, only now it sounded like it came from the bathroom. I ran to the bathroom and again, stood motionless staring at the ceiling. Frustrated, I heard the next chirp distinctly coming from my bedroom, where I started my search. In a fit of rage, I stood in the hallway, mumbling curse words through gritted teeth. I poised myself in a ready position, knees bent, hands out like a basketball player in a defensive stance and eyes staring blankly forward, fixed on the wall in front of me. My ninja-like trance was broken by another chirp.

“SON OF A BITCH!!!”

Now I heard it coming from downstairs.

“Okay! Now I’m pissed!” I yelled out as I ran downstairs. “You’re ass is mine!” Rational thought had gone bye-bye, as I was now verbally abusing an inanimate object and yelling out loud threats of what I was going to do to it once I found the faulty detector. The whole process started all over again, as the chirp had me sprinting from the basement to the ground floor and back upstairs again. After an hour or so, I devised a strategy and finally isolated what I hoped, was the bad detector. The chirp rung out every 3 minutes but as I stood below staring upward, the time seemed much longer than that. Slowly swaying back and forth, like a praying mantis stalking a bug, I psychotically giggled over and over,

“Now I got you! Now I got you!” Then from nowhere, my daughter popped out and just as the chirp sounded she asked,

“Hey dad. Whatcha doin?” Her question broke my feeble concentration and I was unable to tell if this was the bad smoke detector.

“Aaawwww! Come on!!!!” I yelled out near tears, while punching the air in frustration and stomping around in a circle. Eventually, I located the bad detector and changed the battery but the angst this search exacted on my psyche, knocked 5 years off my life.
So, I guess I can hear, if something really annoys me. My wife shouldn’t scold me about selective hearing but instead, take comfort knowing that because I don’t hear her all the time, proves I don’t find her annoying. And that last statement of mine is a prime example of the circle of marriage. Man doesn’t hear wife. Man inadvertently insults wife. Wife throws man into a giant spider web to his ultimate doom.