The car next to you. Morning traffic.

Q: Why is a 45 year old man listening to music that loud?
A: Whoring himself to a large corporation makes him feel nauseous and uncomfortable in his skin. The anticipation of how his day will go literally makes his head spin. Somehow, in the not-so-deep recesses of his former teenage mind, he remembers how it felt to escape from his horrifyingly depressing adolescent existence by putting on headphones in his darkened bedroom and making his ears ring. The thumping loudness pushes those sickening thoughts out of his frontal lobe. The music is so deafening that little else can survive between the headphones earpieces.
And so, this middle-aged man puts a 'classic' AC/DC disc into the player and turns the volume up just below the pain level. As he gets closer to the brothel that is his place of work, he must edge the volume even higher. His ears are getting used to the pain and he wants stay at the threshold of pain.
He shuts off the ignition and his ears ring. He strides into the bordello with a pained expression on his face and feels his stomach tighten as he approaches his cubicle.