Ever get physically tired of listening to an album before it plays all the way through, even though you ostensibly like the band and its music? An ongoing trend in the digital remastering of pop music has placed pressure on sound engineers to increasingly compress the dynamic range, and thus make everything sound uniformly louder, as described in this article. I'd never heard of this practice, but it explains why TV commercials sound so loud, and could be a reason why many people espouse vinyl as sounding better than modern CDs. This escalation of compression has been termed the "loudness war."
It was while we sat in the mess hall that Lasalle decided he didn’t want any more of what the Armed Forces supposedly had to offer. He had watched the movies – Black Hawk Down, A Few Good Men, Biloxi Blues – the same movies as I had, and they had flash-frozen a certain moment, a quiet but definite vision of a time period into his mind. It was something akin to a memory, one based in the ideals of a cinematic landscape and its soft, sepia edges, rather than the fixed realities we occupy from day to day. Youth’s hauntingly brief dream, the type of feeling that characters in a movie express to each other in muted voices and that real people tend to avoid assiduously. Sometimes Lasalle and I would try to talk through this, but we could never quite come to grips with the concept: decay is a shapeless mass passing across the face of the sun, beneath which walk all manner of people, blindly. And so we tried to talk about this but without much success, and then Lasalle told me he was going to leave the Army, as if it was some kind of consolation prize. I suspect that Lasalle enlisted with the Army in the first place so that he could affix himself to the never-experienced but very real memory that the movies had granted him, a powerful sense of his own fleeting youth and of its importance. Within this motionless epoch supposedly resided the ideal of a stoic dignity, a sense of surety and know-how that only an Army man can truly possess.
The problem was that this cinematic, mental moment of Lasalle’s was at odds with the events surrounding the two of us. By the third week, sometime after Old Sergeant Floyd Lever’s screaming fit but before Lasalle’s bedsheets were pissed in for a fourth consecutive night by an unannounced party, Lasalle declared himself ready to leave, right after we finished up at mess hall, and did I want to come with him? I didn’t: his vision was an idyll that I never shared, and so I was protected from the pain of its falsehood. Watching movies never caused me to equate myself with the characters or even their viewpoints: Mathew Broderick and Jack Nicholson have always been separate from me, no matter how empathetic their various characters may have been, even in times of war and strife. And plus, I still don’t consider my youth valuable enough to lament, even now that I am in the process of its loss.
We came from the same small suburb in
Anyway, the reasons for this friendship didn’t matter because it was real and we were allies to each other throughout the struggles of Basic Training. I am a fast runner, but slowed my pace significantly so that chunky Lasalle could have some company. Old Floyd Lever screamed at both of us, called us queers or cocksucking faggotheads, his diction a shocking mix of fourth-grade creativity and fifth-grade homophobia. But Lasalle gradually ran his way into shape, and I picked up my pace until we ran smack in the middle of the pack, olive-drab tanktops and weighted backpacks, the soft middle, exactly where we wanted to be. Not enough to stand out in any way, an approach strictly devoid of self-sensationalism. Cocksucking faggotheads. Maybe Old Floyd Lever was right; neither Lasalle nor I was gay, but in the starkly lit world of Army life, such a devotion to mediocrity could only be viewed as womanly, and thus unsuitable.
Several women trained with us, none so cruel as Missy Divine, who spent most of her time plotting to cut the eyes out of anyone so stupid as to imply a sexual or coquettish implication to her name. She was devoutly hideous, a slave to that strange banner occasionally taken up by indiscriminately ugly women, who force themselves towards mannishness and shrewism as a defense against beauty’s unwilling attitude towards them. It wasn’t in her first nature, Lasalle insisted before filling her combat boots (he called them her slut-heels) with peeled potatoes; he liked his women feisty and heinous. His words, not mine. I suspected Missy as the culprit who pissed in Lasalle’s sheets for those four sequential nights, although I was never proven wrong or right. But she had the look of a urinator to me, fierce and uncompromising, and just a little bit filthy. Old Floyd Lever shaved her head himself and accidentally cut her scalp because it was so misshapen, poorly suited to the razor as a craggy boulder with overlong eyes. Lasalle watched her sometimes and I ignored this.
We sat at mess the day after Missy Divine’s supposed fourth urination and wolfed down our food. Lasalle could eat more than anyone but Nedward O’Brian, whose parents couldn’t settle on a proper first name and so left him with a permanent indecisiveness towards action in general; as a result, Nedward was incapable of saying no to any earthly pleasure. How he made it past the initial screenings is beyond me and attests to the truly desperate need for manpower in those days – Nedward was hideously corpulent and permanently sweat-soaked, a rolling, flatulent mess of humanity incapable of movements except on the grand scale. He was from
