The Show That Finally Taught Me to Wear Earplugs

My last festival weekend of the season was beautiful, which is exactly why I did not notice until it was too late. Three days of June, my favorite band closing the final night, and I stood in the middle of the crowd singing along like a woman twenty years younger. Then on the drive home over the Bay Bridge it started to make sense, this heaviness I had carried home. It was not my legs. It was my ears. There was a thin, high ring that would not quiet down, and it was still there when I got into bed and only a little better by morning.

I have been going to shows since I was forty, and until a pair of Eargasm plugs turned up in my life I told myself the same story the whole time: the ring is just normal, everybody has it, it fades by lunch. Mostly it did. But my mother is 88 now and she cannot follow a single conversation across a dim sum table anymore, and every visit makes my chest tight in a way I have a hard time saying out loud. She never wore earplugs to a show in her life. And I could not claim I had a better plan than she did, not really.

So one Tuesday I went to see a friend who mixes sound at an amphitheatre, a guy who has spent twenty years inside the loudest part of the building, and I asked him straight. What do you do about your ears? He pulled a small metal case out of his pocket, the kind that holds a key or a fishing hook, and set it on the table. Real earplugs, he said. Not the foam ones that make everything sound underwater. He twisted the little pair open and handed them across. That thing with a barrel through it, when I finally heard them at a show, it changed my whole idea of what protecting your hearing feels like.

Eargasm. That is what they are called, and Eargasm is what I went home and ordered the same week. There are two small bars inside the case, you insert them so the little barrel points in, and the first few minutes honestly feel odd, like you are wearing something you should probably remove. Then the band starts and you understand: nothing is muffled, everything is just a little kinder. The cymbal shimmer dims, the bass still moves, and the crowd roar that used to sit right behind your skull gets set back at arm's length. More than a year later they still live in my concert bag in that same case.

The first show I wore them, it was all still there, the songs crisper than I expected and the night clearer than I deserved after all those years of going without. I walked out to a parking lot that was quiet instead of ringing. That is when I finally understood.

The honest part is that I fought this for years and loved the noise too much, and I am not here to tell you to change a single thing about the way you enjoy a concert. I just want you to know what it did for me. I wore the Eargasm pair to an outdoor amphitheatre in late summer and I could still feel the thump of the kick drum in my chest and hear every word of the songs I have loved since I was young. It did not take anything away. It only took the cruel edge off the night that used to cost me the whole day after.

The difference showed up the same night. I sang along, my best friend and I danced, we walked over the grass to the car talking in a normal voice instead of yelling over a blanket of ringing. And when I got home and went to bed, for the first time in a very long time, there was no high whistle in the quiet. I kept listening for it, half waiting for it to show up late and ruin my luck, and it never came.

They look small in the case, almost like something you would lose behind a couch, but they are the piece of my kit I check for first when I pack for a venue now. Tickets, phone, the little case, that is the order. That became the whole year: more shows than I have been to in years, and not one of them cost me an afternoon lying in bed with a headache that sits right behind your temples.

I still love a loud show and I am not going to pretend otherwise. But I have finally stopped confusing my own tired ears with proof that I had a good time. A good night does not have to leave a bill in your ears. The difference, I can tell you first hand, is everything.

What I'd Tell You If We Were Sitting at My Kitchen Table

If you were sitting here with me right now, congee on the stove and a cup of jasmine tea in your hand, here is the only thing I would say, and I would say it plainly. The concert does not have to cost you the night after. A small, well made high fidelity earplug keeps the music and drops the damage after, and you do not have to be my age to learn it. I wish someone had said it to me that clearly at twenty one, it would have saved me a long run of mornings staring at the fog. The quiet after is just as much a part of a great show as the song is, and once you taste it, you will not want to go back.