Monday 23 July 2007

Tinnitus and the Sounds of the Suburbs

My ear seems a little better today, I say a little better because they are both ringing now which is at least consistent and not making me feel lopsided. I’ll have to take earplugs to the gig on Friday, I have never used them before on stage but If my ears are sensitive at the moment I don’t want to do any permanent damage to them. Now I’m wishing the wax would come back.

Never satisfied me.

Bizarre thought though, the last thing one of my ears ever being able to hear was one of my songs played too loudly, it would be like a gunsmith being shot by one of the guns he designed or walking into your own bear trap or being run over by your own car because you left the handbrake off. As we get closer to a run of gigs like this I am forever worried that something will happen to one of the band to prevent us from completing our commitments. As I have said before we don’t play very often so that would be very hard on us and our audience especially as these are to be the very final gigs.


1965

I hammered on the front door and waited impatiently for what seemed to be for ever for the door to open. I can’t remember who opened it, I just remember a pair of legs as I passed them mumbling “going to my room to play” and ran upstairs to seek sanctuary in my little box room.

I was living in this house with my mum and dad and my two older sisters Lorraine and Sandra. Being the youngest in the house I had the smallest room which I shared with various bits of discarded kitchen furniture and suitcases which never made it into the loft. You took your life into your own hands getting into our loft, it entailed hanging from the ceiling over a steep stairwell to get anything in there. No, dumping it in my room was the easiest option.

I don’t remember being angry about it but then again I was always angry, we all were, we were angry with each other, always, so the crap in my room didn’t really figure. There was just room for my few toys, my bed and my dreams but there wasn’t enough room for all that and this nightmare. I fell heavily on to the bed with the pressure of events bearing down on me. I put my head under the pillow and hid.

No matter how I tried I could not get what I had just down out of my head, it was replayed time and time again, each time getting exaggerated to the point were it got to burning Rome proportions. I tossed and turned keeping the sound of intermittent sobbing to myself.

What if my parents found out? I’m really for it! Should I tell them? Noooooo! How can I go down stairs and say. Mum, Dad? I’ve just burnt a lorry down to the ground. I’ve never heard of anyone doing that, but I didn’t know of anyone who had burnt a lorry down to the ground. This was new territory for me and I felt that it wasn’t a thing you voluntarily admitted to, you got caught doing it fine, but you’d never just say I’ve just set light to a lorry. That was absurd.

I was in agony and I couldn’t lie on my bed anymore, I didn’t know what to do with myself.

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