The Insidiousness of Tinnitus

I'm 34 next month. 

For the past...oh let's call it...20 years or so I have been subjecting myself to pretty intense volumes of sound. It started when I was in military school: To escape the awful life I was living I would plant my head directly in front of the amplifier to which I had an electric guitar connected, and then I would just dose my face with obnoxiously loud power chords. 

This was my release. It was my way of decompressing, and at that age (15 or so) I thought it was fucking badass! Truth be told, it *was* fucking badass. It felt incredible. It was a huge rush that acted as a sort of reset button for my emotional condition. 

After high school/military school, I went on to college. This is when earbud headphones became my absolute best friend. I worked out a *lot* in college, and I don't think I ever entered the gym without my headphones in, blasting music into my ears at near-to-full volume. 

This particular habit was, I believe, an escape mechanism for not having to be social with other gym goers. I didn't (and still don't) like to be social when I work out. I am there for one thing - making myself better than I was the day before. I don't want to talk to anyone and I sure as hell don't want to listen to the grunting and hissing resounding throughout the weight area.

And then there was the mountain bike. I rode a mountain bike religiously throughout college, and as you might expect, I always did so with headphones in. Always the earbud style headphones, and always at near-to-full volume.

I needed to have a SOUNDTRACK to my life, you know? I needed to feel accompanied by the power of heavy metal and hip-hop at all possible times. In between classes, between meals, before bed, etc., etc.. It only stopped when I absolutely had to have a conversation with someone, listen to a lecture or if I had to sleep. 

After college I got into the corporate world and started doing sales work. Sure, the biking time was less, but the gym time wasn't. Oh, and in between sales calls, in my car, what do you think was going on? That's right - insanely loud music. Everywhere I went. I invested in super high fidelity speakers and expensive amplifiers to ensure that my eardrums were being sufficiently pelted with the maximum possible amount of decibels. 

I was also a fan of concerts. Loud ones. I had to be up front, as close to the speaker cabinets as possible. If my ears weren't ringing after a concert, I obviously didn't have a good enough time. 

This went on for years. Finally, about when I turned 30, I stopped doing the concert thing because it was just not as empowering as it used to be. I didn't really get off on moshing and getting loud and sweaty with a bunch of other twenty-somethings. Plus I wasn't as angry anymore. I still had an ongoing love affair with my headphones, however.

At about the same time, I started playing guitar on the street. Just for fun. I would pick an alley or some other place with good acoustics, set up my small amplifier and just play music for hours. Sometimes without stopping. Always without caring about how loud it really was. This is something I have done consistently, every single weekend for the past 4-5 years.

Let's skip forward to about 3 months ago. I'm sitting around, playing PC games, when I distinctly notice that I can actually *hear* the high-pitched whining of the machinery in my computer. Crazy! My hearing is like, so good, right? I can hear even the highest pitch sounds. I'm so gifted.

Right.

I turned off the computer. The sound remained. 

I didn't think much of it. Maybe there was some other equipment in my condo that was making a high-pitched whine. Perhaps the AC unit. Furnace? Other electronics?

I forgot all about it until the next week when I was falling asleep one evening, I found that I could actually hear what sounded like morse code coming into my ears. This was in addition to the omnipresent high-pitched computer type of whine. It was incredibly faint, but definitely there.

It was at about this time that I started to panic a little bit. My father had told me about his own Tinnitus and, nearing 70 years old himself, I viewed it as just a part of him getting on in age. Since my slow realization that I have Tinnitus, the problem has only worsened. It is now to the point where the ringing in my head (mind you, it's in my HEAD, not my ears. This is sometimes called 'global' Tinnitus.) is 24/7 and quite extreme.

It is exacerbated by loud eruptions of sound, like dropping a cake pan or slamming a door. Sometimes I can't fall asleep at all and I end up having to turn on some sort of white noise generator just to ease into sleep. This affliction has slowly become a certainly maddening aspect of my every waking moment. 

There is now no escape save for...ironically...music. Listening to music takes my minds focus away from the Tinnitus and allows me to forget about it for a time. But it is in fact only for a time, because as soon as external sound leaves my earshot, the Tinnitus is right there to remind me of my foolish decisions as a younger man.

I really don't know how bad this is going to get or how I'm going to manage to live the rest of my life with it. From the research I have done, it appears that once you have hearing damage like this, the problem never gets better. You can only learn to live with it through things like habituation and ear training exercises that help you to disassociate the sound.

What makes this particularly difficult for me is that I like to spend a lot of my time alone. Oftentimes I prefer silence to sound and meditation to activity. Now, things like silence and meditation are too much to ask for. Neither can exist anymore in their true forms, because the Tinnitus is always there. And, some times it's far worse than others. 

The second factor making this especially difficult is that I am predisposed to anxiety and depression. I have been this way all my life, and it doesn't take much to send me into a depressive episode. Knowing that I have an incurable hearing disability now has already prompted very intense and very dark feelings about my life and my future. It's very dire.

I have always used this blog as a way to communicate my feelings and to be creative for an unknown audience of whomever happens to stumble upon my tiny corner of the internet. Now, I am using this blog as a journal. I'm not writing this post to anyone in particular...I'm simply expressing my situation for the sheer purpose of expression itself. 

I'm not trying to sell Tinnitus relief pills. I'm not appealing for medical advice. I'm certainly not trying to monetize what I write and I'm definitely not interested in crowdsourcing donations for therapy. I just want there to be some record of my struggles with life after I'm gone, so that people may look back at all this and gain some understanding as to where my head was when I was alive. 

And where is my head right now? Well...let's just say my head is...

...ringing. 

Steinberger Spirit GT Pro Deluxe review

San Diego - Oh How I Love Thee

San Diego, California...where I currently sit writing this little blog post.

I grew up here. Well, at least in a way I did.

Escondido (the Spanish word for 'hidden'), is a small suburb of San Diego where I spent the majority of my early childhood.

I remember the weather being a constant, mild 70-something degrees most the time. The people here were always sun-soaked, happy and carefree and they lived that way.

That much hasn't changed since I left here 20 years ago.

Now that I'm back on this business trip, I notice that the little city I remember as a kid has grown into a sprawling metropolis with all the sophistication and allure of Chicago and the young, hip, cultural magnetism of Seattle.

It really is a magical place.

The Gaslamp district is a cute little spread of restaurants and shops. I just polished off a meal at one of the Italian places there and now that I'm on my way home, I'm a bit sad.

I'll always have a piece of my heart here. It's not going anywhere and I'm happy to reunite with it whenever I find my travels taking me here.

I love you, San Diego. :)

Through Glass Eyes [A short story]

People often underestimate the annoyance they cause in reading over another’s shoulder. 

To thwart this, simply open up a word processing program on your laptop while on a plane, for example, and type the above sentence. 

Problem solved. 

Now that my privacy has returned to me, I’ll get to the meat of this. I’m on a plane from Oahu to Chicago, where I’m going to be taking yet another flight to Sioux City, Iowa – a city located in a state known more for its corn production than anything else. If I had half the amount of brain cells and the same number of empty hours on my hands, I might have a regular reason for going there. 
But no. Of course not. Nothing in my life is normal. That would be too much to ask for. 

What brings me here is the death of a friend. 

His name was Troy. 38, single, childless and driven by a life-long obsession with optical lens grinding. He had me convinced 10 years or so ago, when we first met while working for the same company, that he was going to be introducing the world to the most flawless method for manufacturing convex crystal lenses, ever. 

What a weirdo, I thought at the time. Who spends their twenties so god damned concerned with glass that they’d forego things like dating and personal hygiene? Aside, of course, from barefoot hippie pipe-makers in West Virginia. I knew one of those once. He was equally as odd. 

Anyway, Troy confided in me for some reason. Maybe it was because I was a social sore thumb without an inkling of concern with following any traditional roadmap for growing up. However it was that Troy came to trusting me, I didn’t mind it. If nothing else Troy was entertaining. He’d often sit down with me and ask bizarre questions related to his craft. 

“How many times do you think you’d have to throw a piece of saucer-shaped diamond against a brick wall before you broke through it, Tim?”, he once asked me. 

“Fuck if I know. A million? Two million?” 

What planet was this guy from? 

Troy ended up quitting his job on a whim and moving to Hawaii. A few years later he persuaded me to do the same, but by the time I had committed to the move he had yet again relocated. This time his travels took him to Chile to work on a long-term project with some observatory under construction at the time. I still moved anyway. I had heard great things about the grass skirt-laden backsides of the female islanders there. 

I was not disappointed when I arrived. Hawaiian ass is indeed fucking exquisite. 

A few months after I got a job and a stable residence I heard from Troy. An e-mail from him informed me that he had created something that the world was simply not ready for: A lens capable of bending light in such a way that a ‘self-contained photonic vortex’ was generated. 

“What the fuck is a self-contained photonic vortex? What the hell does it have to do with me?”…I asked Troy in an e-mail back to him. 

I never did get a response to my questions. 

In fact I didn’t hear anything at all from him until weeks later when I received a letter in the mail from the Chilean observatory where he had been working. It actually concerned me a great deal – Troy told me he didn’t have more than a few days to live and that he was counting on me to guard his life’s work until ‘the world was ready for the next generation of light manipulation’. 

Man, I don’t know what the fuck I’m even doing. All I know is that there is a package of lenses that is right now sitting in a safety deposit box in a community bank located in a tiny ass town called Cresco, a few hours outside of Sioux City. 

I do have some instructions. Troy told me in his last letter that some people were after him; apparently he had trusted his invention to some unsavory people who had ill intentions. He didn’t go in to much detail here, but what he did make clear was that I needed to complete a final step that he didn’t have the time to complete, himself. 

He wrote: 

“In the box in Cresco you’ll find two manila envelopes. One contains 4 lenses. They are labeled A1, A2, B1 and B2. DO NOT LET THEM TOUCH ANYTHING. Even your fingers. These lenses are coated with a plasma that will degrade if you so much as cough on them. In the second envelope there are two spectacle frames. They’re constructed of a special scandium alloy the formula for which I stole from the observatory. Take special care in handling the frames – they’re well-built but certainly not bulletproof. They should fit your face.” 

I have a copy of the e-mail with me as I type this, just in case I have to refer to it later. 

Basically, I need to insert the lenses into the eyeglass frames. 

That’s right – I’m flying to Iowa to build two pairs of mother fucking eyeglasses that a friend of mine was murdered over. Like I said earlier, normalcy in my life would be way too much to ask for. This little science project is going to require some special equipment that isn’t in Cresco…Troy provided me with a somewhat difficult shopping list but apparently I should be able to get this stuff from a jewelry repair store. Troy did some research for me and it looks like I’ll have to make a stop in Davenport – another few hours’ drive from Cresco - before all is said and done. 

Some Pakistani guy runs a luxury watch repair joint there that carries the stuff I need to get this done. 

Joy. 

I’ve only got about 15 more minutes before I have to return the seatback in front of me to its upright and locked position, so I’m going to have to tie this up. After I get off this plane, I’m going to the nearest Kinko’s, printing out this memo, and placing in my breast pocket. It should give some context to whoever might find my dead body if something should happen to me en route to Cresco. 

I don’t know what else to say here, really. If I had a family, a job I cared about…heck, even a dog, I might think twice about endeavoring to do this. 

But I don’t. So who cares, and here goes nothing. 

Oh – one last thing. 

Troy claimed that these special glasses are completely useless 364 days out of the year. There is only a single 12-hour period during which they can actually do anything. Something about atmospheric concentration of solar insolation. 

That date is on a slip of paper I should find in the second envelope, with the two frames. 

So if I understand all this correctly…my dead friend left me instructions for assembling two super-secret pairs of eyeglasses to be worn in sequence on a special day of the year. 

Why? Why would someone want to do this, you might ask? 

Well…in Troy’s words: 

“My invention has but a single purpose. To see God.” 

Plane’s descending now so I gotta get off this computer. This is going to be interesting. 

Signing off… 

Tim Cherrud 

Caretaking.

I gave up my dream of becoming a professional violinist a long, long time ago. 

For many years I harbored this surreal fantasy of earning the respect of orchestral musicians the world over, leveraging my decades of arduous practice to impress even the most discriminating of them. 

Like with any other overblown expectation, reality stepped in and bitch slapped me like an incensed pimp owed 3 weeks of back pay. 

It reminded me of my ineptitude with every arthritic bolt of pain and with every moment of confusion over how exactly to complete the perfect chromatic run. I sold any aspiration I had of being a professional musician and opted for this life, instead. 

Sadly, I didn't make much of a profit. 

Things aren't so bad, though. Not as bad as they could have been, I guess. 

Sometimes when the pressures of conforming to your own standards becomes too much, the best thing to do is to plainly stop giving a fuck. I remember the first time this happened - I was dating a woman who worked the Sephora counter at the local mall, giving free make up lessons to insecure, clueless hags with way too much time on their hands and absent husbands who wouldn't care if their wives looked prettier, anyway. 

Her name was Lori. She expected a lot from me, probably because her ex boyfriend was a Special Forces operative who could maker her cum with barely a hard stare. Nearing 40, she convinced herself that I was her way to an effortless lifestyle of working part time and getting to blow ten grand a month of my money on whatever trivial bullshit her cramped brain could convince her she needed. 

She asked me once, "David, how long until I can move in with you and make you breakfast every morning?", to which I responded, "I don't know Lori, when could you afford your share of my three thousand dollar a month mortgage?". 

I guess that was kind of a callous response...but it set a precedent. 

Lori left me because she thought I didn't care enough for her. Bullshit. I cared plenty. What I didn't care for was encroachment with an ulterior motive more obvious than the crows feet on the faces of what Lori called her 'clients'. 

Sure. 'Clients'. 

I haven't played a violin in months. I can't be bothered, really. I have more pressing engagements. Since relieving myself of the dream of performing Mozart's Concerto Number 5 in A for international audiences, I've moved on to something a lot easier to master. 

Selling black tar heroin. 

Now I get up around 6 am, go for a swim, put on a pot of coffee and wait for my phone to ring. My home phone. Not a cell phone. Cell phones are why lesser dealers get nabbed and canned. 

If it's 'blue', pickup is at 2pm. Reds are noon. If it's 'equipped', it's sealed in waterproof tape. If it's 'cornered' it's intentionally light on weight so whoever is reselling it can cut for profit. If it's 'dog tired', there won't even be a pickup and the call is simply a ploy. 

Sometimes I wonder what would have happened if I stuck with drawing a bow for a living. Or if I let Lori further invade my life. 

Or if I switched from Raisin Bran to Rice Chex. 

Whatever. Life is better now. It has to be. 

Gotta go. 

Phone's ringing. 

NEWSFLASH: Egg Consumption Proportionate to Ass Kicking Capacity

If you know me, you know I like science. I like developing an understanding of things using facts, numbers and proven knowledge (a good reason why I am allergic to religion).

Hopefully then you can appreciate my newest scientific discovery: I have determined a pretty reliable formula for determining how much ass I will kick on any given day using...wait for it...egg consumption. 

It's remarkably simple.

But, it has taken months of trial and error to reach my final, scientifically sound conclusion. I never had this kind of luck when I was trying to prove what color boxers enriched my testosterone levels the most [that's a shame, too - as I believe the correlation IS THERE].

 This all started when I was on the road, travelling for work, and staying at a Hilton hotel somewhere in dumbfuckistan - not that it matters where. Hilton has some badass breakfasts, just so you know. They don't mess around when it comes to self-serve cereal silos, just as an example.

Anyway, I was fueling up one morning on my trip, eating my standard fare: A bagel, maybe some yogurt and a black coffee. But then...I spied on the breakfast table some delicious looking eggs, innocently steaming in their comfy, heated stainless steel food service tray.

 Mmm...look at them. They're resplendent. Fluffy, not overcooked, and with a slight garnish of diced chives. So tempting. So sinfully magnetic...if I didn't know better I would think a charm spell was cast on them by some wizard's apprentice who liked practicing on breakfast food. 

So what the hell. I figured I'd eat some eggs. I got myself a healthy scoopful. Nothing over-the-top...probably 2 eggs worth. I thought nothing of it. I went on about my day thinking it would be just another 24 hours of being relatively awesome.

I didn't really expect what happened next...

Around an hour after my breakfast, I dropped my pen AND THEN CAUGHT IT ON ITS WAY DOWN.

No big deal, right...I just got lucky...

Then, I suddenly remembered the 5th digit of pi after the decimal (9).

Hmm...that's odd...

And THEN, this smoking hot girl at a stoplight I was at raised her sunglasses and made direct eye contact with me (and trust me, my rental vehicle at the time was NOT THAT SEXY).

Ok, something is definitely going on here...

I got to thinking. What is different about today? I'm not wearing my lucky tie...and I haven't sacrificed any small animals to Cthulu in the past 12 hours...so what gives?

AHA! THOSE MOTHER FUCKING EGGS. It had to have been the eggs. I knew it!

But...it wasn't enough to go off a hunch. I needed to test my hypothesis. The next morning, I made my way down to the breakfast area with a clear plan. I would ingest exactly double the eggs I had the prior morning, and then gauge the level of ass kickery I experienced later in the morning.

And holy shit were they delicious. So yummy.

Sure enough...about an hour after leaving the hotel, bound for the airport, a series of quite notable events transpired:

1 - I didn't even need to use my GPS to get from the hotel to the Hertz return center. I EVEN LEFT MY PHONE OFF ENTIRELY. I know...shocking...

2 - I corrected a reference someone on the plane made to medieval England architecture.

3 - Driving back home while travelling at 80 miles per hour, I dodged a refrigerator box that was sitting in the middle of the freeway (it could have had a whole litter of puppies in it for all I know, right?!)

4 - Later in the day, I got hit on by not one, but TWO gay men in the gym. With 10 minutes of each other. WHAT THE FUCK!?

I had all the evidence I needed to conduct my final experiment - tripling the egg consumption. This was dangerous...because I didn't know what to expect. How much of a epic superstar Johnny Awesome would I become? Would I spontaneously develop a cure for AIDS and help a dozen old ladies across the street, all before noon? It was uncharted territory.

But, being a man of SCIENCE, I was ready to take the plunge.

Dear readers, I cannot disclose to you the exact results of this experiment, because frankly they're just way too astounding to believe.

I will just say this: for about 10 hours after eating 6 delicious eggs, I existed on a plane of consciousness that would impress even the most devout Shaolin monk. I also performed physical feats that others would only write about in their life memoirs.

You probably don't share my enthusiasm for scientific experimentation, reader. You probably don't even BELIEVE my claims here, but I don't care. Why?

BECAUSE I HAD 8 EGGS THIS MORNING, MOTHER FUCKER.

8.

There is literally nothing anyone can do to cramp my style this day. I am working on solving a 256-sided Rubik's cube at the moment and things are going well. I also just set up a date with a supermodel for later this evening. Oh and I just got a voicemail from Neil DeGrasse Tyson, asking if I would kindly share my knowledge with him, on the subject of gauging gravitational force wave distortions in super massive black holes.

I just had to type this out because I'm not one to keep my revelations bottled up inside.

If YOU found centuries-old Egyptian treasure hidden in your back yard, wouldn't YOU want to tell the world?

Steve Vai - A god among gods.

Not only does Steve Vai's playing ability rival even the BEST guitarists, but his humility and understanding of the entire musical endeavor is just simply awesome.

Check this out:



I love you Steve. :)