Tinnitus can be mind-numbingly annoying. Fortunately for me, it is not continual… though, lately, it seems to be increasingly common. Right now, for example, I hear sounds like crickets; thousands of loud crickets —probably drunk and looking for trouble—doing their damnedest to ruin any possibility of experiencing even a smidgeon of serenity. Crickets that should be crushed, poisoned, electrocuted, or otherwise silenced. Ever since I woke two hours ago, the noise has been a consistent buzz or rasp or chirp or whatever noise crickets make when their primary objective is to cause me to feel anger, grief, and a growing desire to stab both my eardrums with an icepick. Because of my distaste for pain and because I would rather hear something than nothing, I will not acquiesce to my absurd thoughts about inflicting on myself excruciating pain and perpetual deafness. The irritating insects, though, are not the only upsetting tinnitus noises. Fairly often, I hear the rhythmic pounding of my heart…thumping and thumping and thumping until I feel like screaming or physically removing the beating beast with a sharp knife and a pair of heavy-duty surgical retractors. Again, though, I always choose to live with the repetitive bass guitar playing in my ears, rather than to die in the throes of intense pain, with a scalpel stuck in my chest and a cold stainless steel instrument grasping at a non-functioning blood pump. In an attempt to deal with the disturbances in more peaceful ways, I am trying self-therapy—as in mentally restructuring my brain. I’ll try writing something mindlessly stupid; something that might cause readers (and myself) to believe I have gone over the edge…lost my mind…successfully performed a self-lobotomy.
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The story is that color photography was not possible until 1861, when the first color photograph was unveiled by Scottish physicist James Clerk Maxwell. That is the story. Reality says otherwise. The reason color photography was not possible until then was because color was not available until 1860. Until then, the world was almost entirely greyscale. That is the reason we see only black & white—greyscale—images in older photos. For a similar reason, we do not see any Buick 1904 Model B automobiles because, of the 37 built that year, none survived. Fourteen Buick Model Cs from 1905, which had a list price at that time of $1,200, still survive today; like color photographs, none were possible much earlier, because Buick Motor Company was not incorporated until 1903. As everyone knows, it has always been impossible to build Buicks before the company’s formal incorporation.
Facts and fantasies swim in the same oceans. If I were to show you a color photograph of a 1901 pink Buick, you would immediately recognize it—not as a fake, but as a fantasy. Yet you would not be sure whether my color photograph of a pink Buick of more recent vintage was real or artificial.
How do you tell which of two different versions of song lyrics is legitimately original? Say, for example, two strings of words said to be from the Jimi Hendrix tune, Purple Haze:
Excuse me while I kiss the sky
Excuse me while I kiss this guy
The answer is so obvious I will not even waste your time, nor mine, to explain. Other variations between fact and fantasy are not quite as patently obvious. But some are. So, the message I send is this: do your research. Explore the possibilities. What is the earliest year in which Purple Haze could have been written? It is impossible to say with certainty, but with the knowledge that the world was almost entirely greyscale until 1860, 1860 is a safe bet. However, knowing that Jimi Hendrix wrote the song when he was about 24 years old and that he was born in November 1942, it is impossible that the song was written before 1966. Logic, it seems, plays a part in differentiating between fact and fantasy, when reality is introduced into the equation.
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Yesterday’s energy dipped and then spiked. Earlier this morning, if a heart monitor had been attached to my chest, the device’s line would have zig-zagged like a seismograph recording a an earth-shattering earthquake. The second cup of espresso probably did nothing to smooth the line, but the caffeine in my system seems to have dwindled a bit over time. I feel the bursts of energy seeping out of me, leaving me ready for a little rest…perhaps even a nap.
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I am so very impatient to end this 10-month-so-far experience with the effects of lung cancer and its treatment. But the chemo will continue and radiation therapy soon will be added to the mix. The options, I suppose, would be to try “natural” therapies (with little or no evidence they work) or to stop therapy all together and let nature take its course. I am not prepared to do either. Other people have undergone treatments—far more difficult and life-altering—for years; prolonging and improving the quality of their lives. I, too, should be able to deal with whatever I must to successfully battle this interruption to my tranquility. I do not want it said about me, “He was a chicken-shit whiner who gave up without really trying.” Instead, I’d prefer it said, “Amazingly, he survived with cancer well over 40 years, winning the Boston Marathon for the last 10 of them. The fact that he lived to age 121 was an inspiration.” Of course, I would have to collect welfare for many of those latter years, so I may have to rethink this.
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