hearing raze for the rest of my life, i'll hear ringing in my right ear if there's nothing else to hone in on. i have to go looking for it. i need something close to silence to find it. but i know it's there. thirteen years ago, i was sitting too close to the stage at phog. acoustic guitars patched into a tiny bar's pa system shouldn't sound like they're coming out of marshall stacks in an amphitheater. but they did. chad turned up louder than anyone else. he was so loud i almost couldn't tell what he was doing. he kept singing, "you can wake me up, wake me up." angela's dad made a face that said everything i couldn't put into words about how horrible it was. i asked what time it was, and he said, "i know what time it is. fuckin' late!" angela hugged me when we stepped outside to see if we could still hear. she'd never done that before. she told me she was trying to keep my third eye open and the air above my head bright. she imagined my hands glowing orange and my throat exploding plumes of light lacy smoke. "maybe i failed you," she said. "maybe i'm not such a good light worker." i thought my left ear was the one i needed to protect. i didn't want to cover both of them and look like a dick. so i left the right one alone. i paid for it later. nothing was lost. not anything i was going to miss, anyway. but that was when the ringing started. it should have happened sooner. it should have been worse. my ears should be a mess after what i put them through. i spent so many friday nights in bars listening to music that should have deafened me. i don't know how i got away with it. maybe my ears were as angry as the rest of me back then. maybe the hate they harboured made them more resilient. i started taking better care of myself. my hearing seemed to get better. i heard a bob_dylan song in a record store and the harmonica went right through me. it hurt. street noise seemed louder. quiet things cut deeper. i told ric i thought it was supposed to work the other way around. things got duller as you got older. not sharper. i said it didn't make sense that a thing like that could happen. he said that was because it wasn't happening. my hearing wasn't improving. my brain was just getting better at reading what my ears took in. i keep hearing new things all the time. every day my mind gives back what my body takes away. when you think about losing one of your senses, the first thing that comes to mind is probably going blind. i used to think that was the worst thing that could happen to me. now i'm not so sure. losing my vision would scare me, but i think going_deaf would break me. i've heard music in my head since before i could speak. i've spent my life eating it with my ears. i would die without it. but i'm learning there's music in everything. sound doesn't stop just because you can't hear it anymore. so i'm trying to listen to everything i see. that way, when all the light i've known leaves me, you can take out my eyes and make them your own, and you can read the words to every song i've ever heard or held in the clenched fist i've made of my throat. 220320 what's it to you? who go blather from