Whether its Donald Trump, Mel Gibson or my weed dealer Garrett, sometimes it takes hearing someone speak to realize theyre no good

I used to buy weed from a guy who Ill call Garrett. He was one of several unlicensed pharmacists I dealt with in those days. He got really good, potent pot that smelled like orange peels and Christmas trees and made your scalp tingle.

The trouble was that you had to hang out with Garrett to get it. He lived in a dark terrarium of a basement apartment on the east side of Athens, Georgia. White as an underground mushroom, Garrett was always in the same spot on the couch facing a pair of 50-inch TV screens hed parked side by side so he could play video games and watch daytime TV at the same time.

The apartment itself wasnt what made hanging out with Garrett such an ordeal, or even the competing blasts of sound, light and color coming from the two TVs. It was Garretts voice.

Garrett is the only person Ive known in real life who has what I call Alex Jones voice, a sound somewhere between a bleat and a wail with a foot-high slurry of gravel underneath. And, like Jones the popular conspiracy theorist, birther nut and talk-radio howler monkey Garrett seemed to live in a perpetual state of enraged grievance.

Every time I visited it was the same, and yet it was always different. In a bawling tone like a wounded calf wailing from a ditch, Garrett would recount the latest low-down trick his ex-wife had pulled, the staggering amounts of money our other friends owed him for weed and cocaine and pills, the way the damn neighbors dog barks all day when theyre at work.

I would sit there with smoke trailing from my mouth and nostrils, sinking lower and lower on the slightly greasy-feeling leather couch as I got bludgeoned by Garretts voluble swings between mawkish self-pity and heated vows of revenge. It was enervating, exhausting, overwhelming.

It occurred to me one day as I paid for my quarter bag and drove bleary-eyed and thoroughly demoralized back to my apartment in Normaltown that peoples voices are a song that we sing about ourselves to everyone we meet. And Garrettss song was like a bombastic modern classical suite for orchestra, choir and leaf-blower.

I believe that our minds are often processing information at levels that were only dimly aware of, if at all. Our ears are often smarter than we are.

Look at the recent controversy that has erupted over audio tape of Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump bragging to Access Hollywood reporter Billy Bush about how his fame entitles him to kiss and grope women without their consent.

For months we have known that Trump is a sexist and a braggart with an interior life that most probably resembles the decimated hellscape around Hiroshimas ground zero on the day after the blast. Weve read court depositions about how he treated his ex-wife Ivana. Weve shuddered over transcripts of his conversations with Sirius XM shock jock Howard Stern.

However, there is something entirely different about hearing the slimy, grasping over-eagerness in his tone with Bush, his smugness and complete nonchalance about womens personal space and agency. It makes the skin crawl and has led a segment of his followers and supporters to abruptly rediscover their gag reflex.

Theres a certain delicious irony in Trumps own horrible, cold-fingers-on-your-neck voice being the final thing that shuts him up and potentially derails any last fleeting hopes that he might expand his appeal beyond his angry, frothing base. Weve seen this before, though.

After years of faint signals on the horizon that actor Mel Gibson was coming unraveled, the world was treated to a venti-sized dose of his insanity when voice mails leaked of him threatening his ex Oksana Grigorieva. Thats what ended up killing his career.

It was one thing to know intellectually that he was hitting the big mental bug-zapper, but when we heard the viciousness with which he spoke to Grigorieva, the bullying rage in his voice, the public rejected him on a visceral level.

Similarly, former Los Angeles Clippers owner Donald Sterling was known as a racist for decades and yet enjoyed a respectable reputation to the world at large. However, when audio leaked of Sterling castigating his girlfriend for appearing on social media with black people, the world reacted with revulsion.

It was the mix of the petulance and contempt in Sterlings wheedling, nasal rant that lit the fuse on the bomb that detonated his good standing before the world.

As with Gibson and Trump, the world heard his voice and immediately remembered the grade-school bully who tormented them, the fatuous high school vice-principal who unjustly punished them, the police officer who punched them in the face before shoving them into a squad car or the boss who made their work life a living hell.

Our minds are constantly recording, measuring, analyzing. We recognize patterns and make associations. Its how we learned to survive in this world, by keeping close track of what hurt us or made us sick in the past.

Your voice is revealing more about you to the world than you realize. What are your lyrics? What kind of song are you singing?

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