Now Hear This

Yeah, man, life’s a bitch and then ya die. I can’t count the slings and arrows that go with a lifetime.  There’s just too fucking many of them. 

And as you get older, more and more of life’s troubles revolve around the body.  That’s right, this vehicle, this chassis, this conveyance that moves our fabulous brains around has its own planned obsolescence.  Its own decay.  Its own disintegration.

Some of that is more obvious than others.  Total hip replacement, a couple of them. A couple of injurious traffic accidents.  A kick in the head, a fall from a ladder, a mere stumble.  It all takes a toll.  It bends you, makes you shrink, as the body breaks down. 

So, a lot of pain, a lot of suffering, which I have faced and, in most cases, overcome. 

But.

There’s one discomfort that’s impossible to overcome.  One disease.  That has no treatment and no cure. 

What I’m talking about is tinnitus. 

That’s right.  AI defines tinnitus as sounds perceived in the ear with no apparent external stimuli.  Describes it as a ringing or buzzing. 

My tinnitus offers both.  Most of the time I experience a buzzing in my ears.  A sound identical to the sound cicadas make.  Unfortunately, I don’t speak cicada.  Or maybe that’s a good thing.  If there was meaning flowing from cicadas’ noise, I’d have to be pretty seriously mentally ill! 

Unlike the sound our little insect friends make, mine is continuous.  Non-stop.  24/7.  I wake up and the buzzing is there, and it will be there until I lose consciousness the next time. Not only is it perpetual, it’s loud! 

Forgive me if I don’t spend a lot of time describing my symptoms.  It’s my opinion that if you don’t have tinnitus, you can’t imagine what it’s like. Sorry, really, thanks for trying.  Suffice to say that it’s a burden, an albatross hanging.

And I won’t spend any time speculating about its origin.  There were some concerts in the late 70s I suspect lodged their aftermath permanently in my brain.  And I spent a lot of time in computer machine rooms, without proper hearing protection, in an environment where ambient noise clocks in at over 100 decibels. 

And who knows what else may have led to such an affliction.  From what I know, like everything else, the ultimate root of the problem is most likely in the brain.  It’s not the signal that’s the problem.  The ear is hearing just fine.   Referring back to the definition of tinnitus, it’s something that happens without external stimulation. So, the problem is not in the biological apparatus of hearing, not the misinterpretation of a signal. It’s something firing up in the brain, most likely in auditory cortex.

And maybe it’s the result of some injury, lord only knows I’ve hit my head a few times.  I can’t connect the emergence of tinnitus with any specific fall or fail. 

So … what to do?  How about the elderly man in New York City who went to the roof of his apartment building and jumped off?  That really happened. He left a note.  The tinnitus had finally taken its ultimate toll.  And he ended his life over it.

Me?  While it can be unpleasant, I have a treatment.  Turns out my love of music has more than one benefit.  The fact is I can drown out the buzzing with tunes! 

And I don’t even have to crank the volume to 11 (although I often do!)  Any level of music is soothing, and any genre accomplishes the objective: taking my mind off the buzzing. 

Thus, the constant streaming of music.  And when I don’t have access to recorded music, I can fire up the internal radio.  I can play familiar songs or make up altogether new songs.  There’s always music playing in my mind, one way or another.

Now we’ve come to my third rule of writing: Don’t write in silence.  Tune in the tunes! Find the right genre for what you’re doing, the appropriate accompaniment to your literary composition.  Odds are there’s something that will fit your mood, that will match your intentions and stimulate the release of another level of storytelling energy.  YouTube has a colossal catalog of every genre imaginable. Playlists that will tickle your memory with comfortable familiar tunes or challenge your musical sensibilities with something entirely new. And Spotify has a similarly copious and diverse collection of musical selections. (Both are available with ad-free premium subscriptions, so there’s nothing to interrupt your writing frame of mind.) 

So … when you’re talkin’ my arm off, and I am, apparently, listening, dutifully, to the conversation … what I’m really doin’ is listenin’ to my internal Disc Jockey!  KIDDING!  Well, not really….