Fucking Tinittus (2008)
By the hammer of Thor! I have tinnitus. The alarm bell of my vulnerability is ringing in my ears. I’ve let the team down. I’ve hurt myself. I’ve quite possibly permanently damaged one of the most precious and valuable parts of my body. I’ve fucked up. (This is me being positive.)
A friend gave me a good analogy of Tinnitus. In some dormant volcanoes there are trees that grow inside. When the volcano blows, the trees are flattened, and never grow again. Inside your ear there are thousands of tiny hair follicles that pick up sound. When you are exposed to loud music, they can be damaged. Sufferers of Tinnitus are left with the ghost of audio haunting their ear cave. A hollow howl-cycle filling up the evening silence like bats blocking the moon.
After examining the clues, detective me is pointing the finger at Ween. I saw their three hour guitar blast-a-thon front and centre stage with naked ears. What was even more intense than the music was the incessant whistling and cheering of rabid fans around me. Having a high pitch whistle in your ear at the end of a concert is like quenching your thirst with vegemite.
What makes this all the more painful is that I knew better. My dear Mother has been going on about tinnitus my whole life. She saw a loud rock band in the 70’s and attributes it to all manner of mental unrest. With blue eyes wide I listened to her warnings, but headed off in my late teens to thrash about in all kinds of sonic muck pits. Naturally, it wasn’t going to happen to me. Since my mid-twenties I’ve found my ears getting a lot more sensitive and have made a real effort to wear ear plugs. Unfortunately, it tends to cut out too much of everything and you have a sense of missing out, like having sex wrapped in bubble wrap.
The reality is, almost all live gigs are too loud, and our hearing is a delicate entity. While we’re smashed over the head about protecting our bodies from the sun, or cigarettes, the concept of hearing damage is still a kind of novelty. Wearing sunglasses at an outdoor festival is cool. Wearing ear plugs is piss weak, or something security do because they must hate the band. It’s all fun and games when your stomach’s full of kickdrum, and the power chords are changing your life, but where’s the pay off when its 2am and you’re still listening to DJ Dickhead’s minimalist German techno hit ‘eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee.’
There’s stacks of stuff on the net about how to manage it and seek support but I’m not even ready for that. I don’t want to manage it because I don’t want to have it! I’m already a short sighted, emotionally fragile insomniac – I don’t need an eerie tone thrown in the mix. I feel like the King who let the trapdoor down for one second too long and now some bandit has busted in and killed his best knight in his sleep. I should have been wearing ear plugs during Ween and because I didn’t I may have signed up for fifty years of the same fucking noise in my ears. I feel hard done by, and I didn’t need any more help in that department either.
Look after your ears! Get custom ‘musicians’ ear plugs that cut out around fifteen decibels. They cost $300 from an audio clinic. You’d spend it on sunnies!
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