I have good ear days and bad ear days. Most days are “good”, in that my ear doesn’t beep. I just whistles like there’s air rushing out of my head. But being that it’s a constant noise, it’s fairly easy to tune out. Other days my ears will beep, usually for a couple of hours then stop, but sometimes they’ll beep all day. Sometimes it’s a random, quieter noise, and that is easy to tune out. Actually all of it is easy to tune out. My work and sleep haven’t been affected. That there is a godsend in and of itself. The rest of the time, if something else can get my attention the noise will not be noticeable. I’ve stopped taking dramamine, clariton and flonase as they don’t seem to do anything more than they do seem to help.

The crappy thing is that it’s all in my head (literally and figuratively). If I can redirect my attention away from the noise then I’m good to go. It’s not like a searing leg pain that can’t be ignored. But it’s crappy because I still have to do these mental workouts just to minimize the impact on my life. I’d much rather take a pill or have an operation than to expend all this mental energy to overcome the problem. I really, really enjoy being lost in thought and letting my mind wander. I don’t like to be focused on one thing when I’m in this state. I’m reading Creativity, a book by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (the guy that wrote Flow). It explains why being in this state is so good for creativity, because you’re letting your subconscious do all the behind-the-scenes work of making associations between different objects and concepts. When there is a unique association made (say, like the future of housing, when people could literally live far from their job and sleep while their autonomous vehicle drives them) then these associations bubble up to the conscious level, where the conscious mind determines if they’re good ideas or not. If they’re good ideas then they’re worth pursuing and expanding upon. And then hopefully you generate some good, service or concept that is judged to be useful and is added to the domain that you’re working in. This is creativity.

Anyway, I like to let my mind wander uninterrupted so that I feel creative. When I’m stuck on an issue at work I know better than to try and think my way through it. It’s better to go for a walk or play guitar or do something so that my subconscious mind can work on it. Then I usually have an epiphany at 3AM and implement the fix when I go to work.

I kind of feel like the rug was pulled out from under me when I started having my ear problems. Like I was literally all set to go to start good habits, like working out and eating less. Then my ears threw me a curveball. But enough time has passed that I’ve accepted this for what it is, and there’s no use for a pity-party, and that life gives no one any guarantees. Plus there’s billions of people that have things going way worse then I, so I can’t really complain.

I’m supposed to get fitted for hearing aids in a couple of weeks. I don’t think it will get rid of the beeping but it will help when my tinnitus gets really bad and it sounds like this high-pitched nasty, metallic sawtooth type of noise instead of the gentle sinusoidal tinnitus that I’ve had for 12+ years and I’m used to. I’m starting to think that my regular tinnitus is caused not from playing loud music when I was younger, but from being around loud machinery at work. This is when I first noticed that the ringing in my ears didn’t go away on the way home. I went to lunch the other day with my friend and was telling him of my situation and he was shocked that I, out of all the people playing in bands, was the one that ended up with hearing problems. There’s other guys that have played loud music twice as long as I have and they don’t have any issues.

If my problems were really due to COVID (and I’m not entirely convinced they are, due to the whole left side of my face hurting for 3-4 days) then I wonder what would happen if I got COVID and/or vaccinated again. Would another bought of COVID cancel out my ear problems? Or would it make it worse? Who knows.

We went to the Fox Theatre last night to see the Beetlejuice musical. It was pretty good. It had some slow parts but the big numbers, with all the singing and dancing and production, was great. It could have done without some sexual references but all in all it was a worthy trip out. I went by the Chesterfield service center and dropped off the tools that the Tesla tech left in my car on Monday, when I finally had the rattling noise fixed (it was two tubes of chapstick that fell in the vents). Then we went to the outlet mall and bought nothing. The cool comic book shop and sports memorabilia shops were gone. It’s back to being clothing shops only. This is disappointing but expected. I wonder if the economy is getting ready to take another nosedive, where nice-to-have-but-not-really-needed shops are the first to go under.

Emma ran at regionals yesterday in Quincy. Her team made it to sectionals so she will run this Saturday in Elmwood. I’ll try to swing by Guitar Center to test out electric drums. I’m slowly trying to piece together a recording studio in the basement, after having so much fun making the wife’s birthday video.

Jack and I were riding around Springfield last Sunday while the wife and Elsa watched the Taylor Swift concert movie. I brought up a previous conversation where Jack was complaining about there being a Pride Month and Hispanic Month and all that but no month for him. I explained that he, being a straight white healthy American male alive in this day and age, has won the genetic lottery. I said that it was still great to be who we (him and myself) are, and that he shouldn’t complain. I said that there’s a Mother’s Day and Father’s Day but no Kids Day, because every day is Kids Day. No need for a special day to celebrate kids lol. I said that being a white American male is like that; every day is Kid’s Day. He said “Yeah but at school it’s like they want us to be gay”. Which I almost bust up laughing at, but the tenor of his voice meant that he was serious. I said to him that you can’t really celebrate something you have no control over. It is weird, on the surface, to have Black History Month or Pride Month. Because you’re born Black or Gay, you don’t have a choice in the matter. So why celebrate something you can’t change. I said they celebrate because of the hardships these minority groups have had in the past and what they’ve had to overcome. That is what they are celebrating. It’s not the immutable physical attributes that they celebrate.

But then I got to thinking – I personally didn’t achieve full self-consciousness until I was in 6th grade. That’s when I started to notice myself and the clothes I wore to school, etc. So Jack, being in 8th grade, may only be two years into being self-concious. So he is presented with an array of pride months and history months for other groups that he is not a part of. He is on a long journey of education, to see why these months are important. But he’s still at the beginning of that journey. As weird as is it is to say it, he may need something or someone to reassure his identity, as a straight white American man, that he has value. I mean, I can see now why so many young white men are disaffected and dissociated with life in the US. I’m not saying they’re right but I can see where they’re coming from. As usual, it’s a problem of education. People need to read, experience and live more to see the wider reality that exists.

I’m also kind of horrified to introduce the concept of validating lives for straight white American men, because I feel that Identity Politics is ultimately detrimental. Like, if I were a White supremicist (sp?) I would be all about minorities having their own months and movements and all that. I would totally push for it. Why? Because it wraps these groups into the warm cocoon of Victimization, where you don’t have to take responsibility for your actions – it’s someone else’s fault why your poor or struggling or whatever. And whenever you start to push this of idea of being victimized by straight, white American men, then you’re unwittingly and unknowingly propping up the other side of the coin, which is that it’s great to be a straight, white American man. Like I feel like my stature of being a straight white American man is being confirmed and propped up by other groups cloistering themselves. There’s no active work needed on my part to validate my existence. Other groups are doing it for me.

To paraphrase the great actor Morgan Freeman, he doesn’t like the idea of Black History Month because every month is American History Month, of which Blacks are an important part. I can see that minorities, throughout history, have had to band together to create strength-in-numbers, in order to achieve justice and gains and acceptance and all that. But then there comes a point where automatically being your brother’s keeper means that you are responsible for his behavior and actions. You will be judged by what your brother does. So then you have to disassociate from the group and start to be an individual, so that you get judged not by the group’s actions but your own. It’s a fine line, this tipping point between having the safety of the group but also being judged as a group.