7 Awful Sounds No One Ever Wants To Hear
I have a weird issue with sound. I never realized it until someone pointed it out to me. I can sleep through the loudest noises; I grew up near a train yard and could sleep through the sound of trains smashing together all night long. But the sound of a plastic bag rustling or a faucet dripping could keep me up all night. So it's not necessarily the volume of a sound that affects me, but some other quality. There's something in certain sounds that just drives me mad. And I've managed to narrow down the seven worst sounds on the entire planet.
A Dog Going Down On Itself
I have a female dog, and like 87 percent of the time we get along fine. I give her kibble and water; she shits on the lawns of my enemies. We're pretty awesome. But there is an issue that creeps in every so often that threatens the very foundation of our relationship, and that's her tendency to full-on glurp-slurp her cooch on the couch.
I appreciate hygiene as much as the next guy; I wash my ass all the time to keep it minty fresh in case I get in an accident and the only way to save me is through some kind of ass compressions. And even though I bathe my dog, I appreciate her willingness to engage in some between-bath refreshing of her giblet shoot and surrounding areas. But holy shit, holy brain-scrambling shit, is the sound just unbearable.
As if her Giger-like mouth organ wasn't gross enough to look at.
There's a subtle squelching quality to the whole endeavor, backed by a bass thrum of her apparently humming along to keep herself occupied as she works deep in the mines of a canine squish mitten. If you've never experienced it, count yourself lucky -- it's absolute auditory madness.
That Unnecessary "Ahh" After A Drink
I appreciate a refreshing beverage as much as the next guy, and nothing beats a cold, delicious glass of beet nectar after a hot day digging unmarked graves. I bet I've enjoyed an ice cold glass of Grandpappy's XXX brew and let loose a satisfied "Ahhh!" after my first gulp once or twice myself. But the thing is this -- everyone gets one. You get one "ahh," and only if it's obvious you've been in a dehydrating situation prior to imbibing.
"AHHHHHHH! THESE TAXES ARE FUCKING DONE!"
Woe be to the aural terrorist who takes it upon themselves to drop an "ahh" after every goddamn swallow. This is not acceptable in 2-year-olds, and if an adult engages in this foolishness it's beyond nails on a chalkboard. It's hardware nails, in your brain, while someone holds up a chalkboard as a platter from which they can remove drinks and "ahh" after each damn sip.
When A Loogie Comes To Fruition
Few people seem to enjoy the sound of another person clearing their throat. It's a gross, aggressively wet sound, and aggressive wet things are best avoided, aren't they? Crocodiles, piranha, grandma in the tub.
Meat Loaf.
Throat-clearing isn't entirely that bothersome to me, though. I've taken enough city buses to appreciate that raspy gagging from all manner of strangers. It's a lot like the background sound of birds in the trees. However, that's just standard throat-clearing. There's one kind of throat-clearing that stands out as its own special kind of skin-crawlingly awful assault on the senses, and that's the kind that comes with its own happy ending. The throat-clearing that legitimately cleared something of substance, right up into that person's maw. Just the sound of a thick, quavering loogie being dislodged and shuttling up from the back of someone's throat against their teeth is like the devil himself tongue-fucking your ear.
Which is sexy only in one very specific scenario.
Adults Having Tantrums
I never realized this was something my sanity couldn't abide until I saw this video.
Oh my lord. Did you get through the whole thing? And if so, is your asshole still bleeding? This is a shock to the senses for any number of legitimate reasons, but above and beyond all the ways this should make you feel bad as a human, the sound of it is just abhorrent. That whine, that despicable, unnecessary, unpleasant, unwelcome whine. It's like everything you think you know about all the people you feel have been unjustly enriched by life over the years, your Kardashians and Hiltons and so on, condensed into the caterwauling of an entitled woman-child who apparently never had to develop any abilities whatsoever to maturely and sanely deal with even the slightest adversity in her entire ignominious existence. This is the sound of privilege, filtered through a douche-nozzle cheesecloth and strained into a fuckstick highball glass. Congrats, you made an asshole mojito.
Bottoms up for this guy.
Dramatic Swallowing
Did you know you can swallow without making a sound whatsoever? Of course you did, you've been doing it your whole life because you're not psychotic. And I'm forced to conclude only the most dangerously mentally unstable are the sorts of people who force a sound with each swallow because secretly they want you to be uncomfortable on a spiritual and emotional level before they try to flay you with a butter knife in their stinking, mildew-encrusted shower stall of a basement apartment.
"Bullshit, I switched to a potato peeler last year."
The "unk" sounds of a forced swallow is your body's way of saying, "Hey, dipshit, you're being unnecessarily ridiculous -- cut it out." It's like an internal alarm clock, trying to draw your attention to how you're being wrong, existentially speaking. And, make no mistake, no one tolerates you doing it. You may do this all the time and no one around you says a thing about it, but they're plotting as sure as they think you are. For as psychotic as you surely must be to actively engage in this baseless, soulless behavior, you're pushing your victims in the same damn direction, and one day, if you don't start the butter-knife flaying, the person you continually subject to this bullshit is going to black out and wake up balls deep in your julienned intestines. So you think about that, dramatic swallowers. You think long and hard.
A Stranger Shitting
The year was 2010. I was at Los Angeles International Airport for the second time in my life. I had my bags, and I was on my way to leave the terminal when the Wolfgang Puck Thai chicken wrap from my departing airport also arrived at its destination. I found the nearest men's room, set up shop in a stall, and proceeded to unburden myself of Wolfgang's less-than-stellar efforts to nourish me.
As I sat in quiet contemplation, playing what I assume in retrospect must have been Angry Birds on my phone, someone took up residence in the stall next to me. Now, there were a number of stalls available, so right away this person was unnecessarily encroaching on my happy place. You don't take adjoining stalls if there are extras available; that's common sense. Common decency, too. It's the way the world works. But whatever, maybe this guy was a drunken pilot and overly confused. How was I to know?
Or maybe, just maybe, he was looking for a glory hole that would never be.
I continued hurling birds at pigs, as is my people's custom, when the fellow in the next stall busted out his intestinal orchestra for a rousing rendition of "Squirt Quintet In E Major."
Pooping, by and large, is a very solitary activity. We have bathrooms at home with single toilets for a reason. Cats go off to a litter box. Most wild animals have a place where they go to specifically leave their waste. All of nature knows you go away to shit. Away. Not toward. Not next to me playing Angry Birds but away. So when the natural order of things is ruined by the good plumbers contracted to work on the washroom at LAX, what you end up with is an unnatural conjunction of terrible ass sounds.
Plus, an unshakable feeling that sends shivers down my spine every time this happens.
Like you, when confronted with a stranger in the next stall, I debate over holding everything I have to do until they leave, or seeing if I can maintain such precise control over my orifices as to let everything slip out of me like a ghost, with nary a peep to be heard. Unlike you and I, the man in the next stall had given up on courtesy and may have actually been trying to make it sound worse than it should have naturally by concentrating extremely hard, like Magneto trying to pull the adamantium from Wolverine's very skeleton, only in this case instead of indestructible metal alloy it was just the remains of a kosher meal and Pabst.
Same difference.
The cherry on this foul sundae was the far end of my neighbor's fecal vuvuzela. It wasn't enough that he had trained his ass to produce a low-budget Niagara Falls; he was one of those grunters. Ever seen a bulldog with its fat, flat little face trying to pull a tennis ball out from under a couch, but it has no snout, so it can't reach? And it just grunts and moans and snorts at the ball? Yeah, that's the sound.
Male Porn Stars
The day after talkie films were invented, grunty porns were invented. Since then, both have advanced in many ways, but the one way in which no one wanted advancement was in the arena of male contribution to pornographic audio. What is wrong with every male porn star? I'll concede I have my doubts that they're not all joking. The shit that comes out of most male porn stars' mouths could easily be misconstrued as a joke, so it's possible it's entirely intentional. But I have a lingering fear also that it's not. That many of these guys are literally screaming as they spatter some poor co-worker with the seed of ennui is harrowing.
Most of these women just want the pizza.
There's clearly no way anyone is turned on by the sounds of a man in a porno. Women, definitely, whether receiving actual pleasure or faking it, have a delightful lyrical quality to their excitations. It's like listening to a really catchy '80s pop-rock song you never knew existed, and you immediately want to hear it again. A man in porno sounds like a garbage man throwing up under your bedroom window at 6 a.m. This includes everything ranging from dialogue to unbearably fake moans.
This. You sound like like this.
The only sounds a dude should properly make during sex are guttural and low volume. It should be all bass and barely audible to anyone outside the room. Growls, grunts, loud exhalations -- these are the currency of actual man humpage. And, if it's on your menu, a fine selection of dirty talk can be included. None of that belongs in porno, however, since porno is supposed to be the brutally unrealistic and over-the-top fake fantasy version of sexuality. So, properly speaking, dudes should be muffled at all times. That ludicrous Tarzan shit isn't doing anyone any favors, and it completely ruins every scene for everyone. How many directors have had to cut scenes when a male porn star starts bellowing like a freight train with its dick stuck in a blender and the woman he's with can't stop laughing? This absolutely must be an issue on-set.
Just imagine doing this shit in the '80s, when VHS tapes were at a premium.
Do us all a favor, male porn stars: You shut your mouths. It may be unfair, but you're set dressing and that's it. And if that makes you feel marginalized, stop and consider the fact you get paid to plow hot ladies on camera and realize there's nothing that can be done to you that will effectively marginalize you in any meaningful way that another human being will ever care about. Your job could require someone to shoot you in the foot when you're done and still no one would sympathize with your plight. So please, stop all that fuss. Just read a book or something while you work. Spare us the dramatics.
For more terrible sounds that didn't make this list, check out Steve Harwell singing in 4 Lead Singers That Sound Shockingly Bad Without The Band, and see why The Beastie Boys never thought "(You Gotta) Fight For Your Right (To Party)" would be a hit in 6 Classic Songs That Were Supposed To Be Jokes.
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