"Harry, you know how much I love watching you pretend to work, but I've got Reagan's 100th birthday to plan, my re-election to fumble, my legacy to cripple, and professional liberals to frame for it. I'm swamped. " —President Barack H. Obama
My ears have been ringing for over seven years now. I can pinpoint the precise moment this began—an explosively awesome gig in spring 2003 where my thunderous bass rig got augmented by a massive in-house subwoofer—but that doesn't make it any easier to deal with. The left ear is definitely worse, but at least it's consistently and predictably bad. The right one falls in and out of dog-whistle range at radically random intervals, and the doctors all say that it's a progressive and permanent case of tinnitus. All rock stars get hit with this sooner or later, but I haven't wanted to be Sting or Pete Townshend for a long time, and it's a wretched feeling that I'm, like, totally over, you know?