Nope.

Can’t do it.

Okay, maybe I’ll try one more ti–… NOPE.

I’m sorry! I’m sorry. I gave it my all. Really. I tried several months ago. And then I tried again last night. And then I tried again today when VICE posted this thing synchronistically about it, but I just can’t. I can’t… with ASMR.

And this one might just be the worst I’ve heard yet.

Go on, try it.

See if you’re any better’n me:

When I go to hell (shouldn’t be long now), I’m pretty much 100% sure that it will be just me, in a room – probably with sanguine stained tiles and rusty torture devices and possibly a clown in the corner. However, none of this equipment will be employed on me. In fact, they’ll just be sat there, covered in dust and spider webs, while a P.A. system constantly loops nothing but amplified samples of the stuff above.

Apple crunching. Lip smacking.

Tongues clicking against mouth roofs and front teeth.

Aaaand… I’m cleaning my ears with a Swiss Army knife just describing it.

It’s so bad that even just the thought – even just the auditory memory of this atrocity – makes me want to be a good girl. Join a church group. Follow the 8 Fold Path. Finish the Bhagavad Gita. Relive Extreme Pilgrim’s tour of 80 faiths around the world myself until I’ve been blessed and saved by every last one of them – from the VooDoo dead-dog demanding gods to whatever whirling dervishes worship. All just to avoid the tympanic torture imbued netherworld that inevitably awaits me if I carry on living like I am. Jesus, those Jesus freaks had it all wrong! Had they just used this instead of some mystical abstract hypothetical landscape of magma and hellfire and (yawn), they would’ve gotten their way far sooner and for far longer from this bish right here. I would have STFU, sat down, and quit having conversations like this:

My patellas would be pew-glued in a nunnery to this day had they played their damnation cards a bit better. (“Sure, Suzie. They MIGHT be lying. But do you really want to risk it? When a soul scouring soundtrack as your eternal death sentence is what we’re gambling here? Have you even heard it? HAVE YOU?!”)

Honestly, I didn’t realize there was even a name for this aversion I feel.

But Vice clarified it for me today.

Misophonia: the hatred of a sound.

Still… that doesn’t explain why I stupidly keep coming back to these horrible little clips and attempting to understand what other people see (hear? feel?) in ASMR. Am I a glutton for punishment? Or am I just jealous of the people commenting about how great it is? And trying to feel it too? The way I tried in vain to feel god between the stained glass walls of the prison sentence that was my formative years? But every damned time I try listening to this shiz, the results are the same. In fact, it’s less straight hatred – more the way I imagine a dog compelled to howl before turning into a werewolf feels. Meanwhile, I morph into what can only be described as an involuntary Patrick Bateman confession scene impression.

Crying, laughing, curling my toes, pressing “stop”… then… pressing “play” again.

I hate to say it, but if “misophonia” is a thing, I must be a misophonic masochist.

Your move, ASMR satan.