A few years ago, I and a friend were "wildcat subletters" in an apartment that was cheap and cool, and more importantly, close to the city. We were caught as illegal sublets and forced to move out quickly. Getting a new place quickly meant taking what we could get quick and cheap. This meant moving way the hell out in Brooklyn, Sunset Park specifically. The neighborhood was predominately hispanic, chinese, and bordered on Boro Park, which is almost exclusively Hasidic & Orthodox Jews. The nearest subway stops for us were local stops on the R train - which I think of as the most miserable rides in the city, it literally never comes out of the tunnel and is local 24 hours a day - and the bus service was pokey.
The neighborhood had some things going for it; good Hispanic and Chinese food, easy access to Newark and JFK airports, and it was close to some awesome parks (like Sunset Park - one of the best views of the city from a park IMHO) and new neighborhoods like Bay Ridge, Bensonhurst, and Coney Island - real Brooklyn.
One of the side effects of this is that my I took on a new primary doctor, and I like him, and I want to stay with him. The downside of this is that to visit him now is a major pain in the rump since Bay Ridge is quite far south and I live quite far north in Brooklyn. For the last few weeks I have been going through an epic battle with an ear infection. I have been on anti-biotics for 24 of the last 31 days and really haven't felt a huge improvement. I can say it is particularly painful at this point, but my hearing has been quite diminished because of it, and I have long suspected I destroyed my hearing anyway. I have taken 2 of the worst jobs for ears: radio disc jockey and traveling business consultant. Loud headphones and hundreds of thousands of air miles are bad bad bad for ears and I am a man who has logged many hours with both. Throw in the ear infection, and what I have known to be a significant loss of hearing to go with it, and I must admit, I have been having the thought rolling around in my mind that I am probably going to go deaf quite early in life, if not quite soon. Today, I went to the ear doctor at the request of my regular doctor to see what's up. I had quite a bit of nerves, and because of the commute, lots of time to think about it.
I can tell ya, a weblog isn't a journal. I have been trying to write something like a weblog entry everyday - whether I end up posting it or not - for awhile now, and my journal writing has really suffered for it. Even so, there is some stuff I reserve for a journal. A journal to me is where you try to document your flow of consciousness. It is where you try to capture the OM of your self, with all the good and bad in it. It is where you try to confront the monsters under the bed, or figure out what has been making the tapping noise behind the wall all these years, or figure out why you say you love birds, yet hate non-native ones like Starlings and Sparrows. Stuff that is too personal or complicated to explain, but yet, also needing to be examined and thought aloud about.
I mention this only because talking about the idea of losing my hearing exists in that realm for me as much as it does in the mundane world of photos of my cats and the travelogue of my exploits in Havre, Montana. There are parts of it that are strange and even a bit dark, but there is no way around that if I want to deal with the mundane elements of it.
The punchline is, I didn't have an ear infection at all. When I was a boy, I had ear tubes implanted (and replaced when they were lost) pretty much my entire childhood. I don't know the full of it, but my middle ears are screwed up and don't drain. I thought that was all over when I got older, but I went to the ear doctor today, had a hearing test, and discovered that my problems are no different than ever. I have had hearing loss as a result of this, but it is mostly transient. If my inner ear wasn't screwed up, I would actually have pretty good hearing. In fact, he said that in my right ear, I have sparkling wonderful hearing when I am not having inner ear problems.
This was all news to me. Over the years, I had thought that my degraded hearing was simply the beginning of me paying the piper for abusing my ears as I have. There have been many times, when in a crowded room, I basically couldn't hear a word being said to me. I would ask people to repeat over and over, and when that became tedious, I simply stopped talking, or found my way out of the situation. Again, I kind of told myself that this is the way things are going to be, and that if anything they were going to get worse.
This is where the weirdness kicks in. The bad stuff. The truth of the matter is, even though I love music and conversation more than anything, I found it easy to accept the loss of my hearing, and in a way, found a sick comfort in it. Because I have been alone most of my adult life, the idea of living in silence didn't really hold the kind of fear for me that going blind might, for example. I don't know what to say. I do know that this is warped. I know that it is not normal to secretly not feel all that bad about not hearing the world around me, and really simply being left with my own thoughts.
I even reached a point in which I had already worked out how I might work around it, which is simply to buy a huge PA system on which I could lay and listen to music so loud that it would percussively beat itself into me. In essence, I planned to feel music physically instead of really hear it. This happens already at concerts and such where I have ear plugs in. It doesn't really work as a substitute, but it can be done.
Now that I have seen the doctor, I probably won't have to go that route. The doctor said I probably would need to have ear tubes put in again, and also add a few more prescriptions to the pile I already take. I wouldn't be able to swim anymore like I do - at least not without super ear plugs - but I was not allowed to swim as a boy because of my tubes, and never learned to swim til I was a teenager (and even now I don't really do it right.) Being kept out of the pool all my young life was a total drag, especially since my sisters are fantastic swimmers and were on the swim team for many many years.
I can give up the pool pretty easily if the trade off is the restoration of mostly normal hearing. When I left the office, it sunk in that I might have another chance - if not my last one - to save my hearing. I translated this info into bad behavior naturally; I turned my headphones up a little extra and smothered myself in music for the next hour or so as I headed into the city. I was sucking down the music like oxygen baby...and not the freaky stuff either. I wanted to hear the big beat, the rock stuff. Fuzz and bombast. Overproduction. Machines. Devo. Gary Numan. The Who. The 1-4-5 chord progression. The 4/4 time. Verse Chorus Verse Repeat Coda Fade.
Again, I know it is counterproductive to celebrate my prospects by turning up the music, but I did it because I finally could do so this one time without guilt. I do intend to take this opportunity seriously, and I intend to go easy on the ears. I am gonna favor speakers to headphones and wear ear plugs at every concert and on every plane ride. I will be a good boy. I know it is sick to be of two minds about going deaf, but even as I type this, I can still here the little "Silence Enough At Last" voice in the back of my mind, totally unrepentant. The logic which says "you would be free from having to listen to stupidity forever" is perverse, but I know myself, and know that demon is simply going to its room to sulk, slamming the door extra hard to protest being sent there by my better angels.
I still have a few months ahead of me of cupping the ear and begging for a repeat, but I will likely go back under the blade and get the ears done and rejoin the planet of sound. Perhaps the return of hearing will make the sounds of the city sound like the warble of a songbird to me. Maybe I will leave the hospital a new man.
That really is the key; not just to hear the world with new ears, but to teach myself to value what I know deep down I would not be sad to see leave my transom. Like everything, that is the hard part; to make myself really want what I don't care for or wish to work for. I have done that before with other stuff, and believe I will figure out how to do that again. I usually don't refer to myself as one with demons, but I suppose there really is some of that here. Looming over me are a few of these things; being fat, smoking on and off, and a certain preference for solitude. Some of these have come and gone too, so I have a frame of reference for starting the effort. Even getting to the point of knowing them and containing them, or at least naming them, was the first.
That process is weird and ugly. I suppose this entry is too. You were warned long in advance of getting the ugly underneath and digging in the dirt. Even then, it wasn't all that brutal. To be honest, I don't know that I have anything too much worse in the hopper than the worst implications of all this. I guess, in short, if this leaves you largely unphased, I don't know that I can bring anything more potent.
But you always knew you had nothing to fear from lil' ol' me didn't ya?
Posted by rudayday at May 19, 2005 08:15 PM