Tinnitus Anyone? (part 2)

Following up on my previous post, Tinnitus: The Silent Killer…Condition.  A week after publishing the article, I visited an ENT about my tinnitus problem. He basically confirmed almost everything I said about it:

• There is no cure for it.
• Most natural remedies are nonsense or perform no better than a placebo.
• The only decent prospects for cure are in the cognitive psychology realm.

The doctor even gave me a referral brochure of the same clinic, the Center of Hearing and Communications mentioned in my previous article. So far, I have no recurrences in the nightmare tinnitus syndrome that woke me in the middle of the night. I do notice the pitches during very quiet moments but it goes away when I’m busy. Knock wood.

Interesting note. Right after I published and shared the Tinnitus:The Non-Killer… piece (queue the horror music), a much more witty and concise article title came to me that conveyed its dark humor, which I have used for today’s article:

Tinnitus, Anyone?

I did sneak that title in the previous article share to Facebook users via the post headline. It’s funny how that is. It always seems there is sudden clarity when something you create that was previously private is suddenly pushed out into the world at large and you can’t take it back. I remember that constantly when deploying newsletters to hundreds of thousands of users. You develop razor focus and a second heart right near your throat when you’re an email manager at the point of no return.

[Reader Alert: Complete Theme Change…]

Reflecting on this missed title pun opportunity, it reminds me of the artistry of the written word  generally and how easy it is to take it for granted. Years back, I learned a lot from the writing team for the company newsletters, both directly and indirectly.  They really mastered pairing down a sentence to its most concise form and doing it quickly. There are always opportunities to say more with less.

The expertise that goes into the entire writing process – throwing out unnecessary words, maintaining proper syntax, thematically stringing together paragraphs, finding just the right opening and closer paragraphs, settling on a title and finally, judicious proofreading, is indeed daunting. As a finish this paragraph, I feel the weight of self-consciousness (I’ve spent nearly an hour on it and It’s about half the length of the original. David, Brian, Ilya, Will, you can step out of my brain now… lol)

During my adolescence and early twenties, I was a decent artist. One of my oldest friends, Walter Sipser, was a genius artist capable of Chuck Close type accuracy as well as abstraction. He had art exhibitions. He taught me alot. I could never be as good as he was. However, I was able to do pretty good landscapes, still lifes, portraits and even cartoons that were published in the Stuy High School’s magazine. In fact, many people thought I was going to pursue art as a career.

As with writing, I had that nagging habit of overworking – in the form of erasing, re-drawing or over-mixing my colors. I eventually got better in college, taking a few courses and learning a few different techniques to improve. But when I decided to make a go for music midstream in college, I just stopped drawing. I regained the ability to draw briefly about 10 years later when doing a series of portraits of my wife, Yajaira who was expecting our child, Talia. Unfortunately, I can no longer draw – at all. My hands just don’t know what to do. So that’s a bit of cautionary tale. You can forget how do something you know how to do if you don’t practice.

As a musician and composer, I definitely learned how to get the junk out of my playing and composing through lots of trial and error, editing and sharing the craft in public. I had some terrible compositions in the beginning. Even as I become a more seasoned composer, I could labor over the final product for weeks even years. One tune I wrote, “Loose Ends” actually took me five years to actually complete. It was odd, I knew I had the makings of a nice tune, but I kept playing through a nice series of melodies and chords but kept getting steered into a dead end and stopping. The ideas flowed logically but so did the dead end. This was some serious writer’s block.

At some point I just willed myself through it for about 2-3 weeks, for hours and days at a time. I recorded the sequence many times on my keyboard, listened thru it at least 100 times and I was done. I knew it was right. There is no substitute for hard work and determination. I haven’t touched the piano is some time now, so I keep that thought in mind as another cautionary tale. Though I do have confidence that I have too many years built into my finger memory to suddenly lose that.

For those of you interested in how the tune came out, this trio version should auto play as you open this page on my site. If not, it’s the first track.

In an ironic twist and companion theme to this very blog article, a close friend commented he really liked the tune but insisted the title, “Loose Ends” sounded stupid to him. My original thought on the title was the idea of tying up loose ends, these tasks that you know you should complete but for whatever reason, don’t and carries on for years. Still, it was a valid opinion. It’s a complex tune that works itself out pretty well logically so perhaps it deserved something better than the somewhat offhand, “Loose Ends” title seems to imply.

So, I guess all this points to some important takeaways for me and perhaps others who are following along this rambling. Keep trying new things and be open to the connections between things you do and what you bring to it. Respect the craft of the art or skill you choose to pursue but be tenacious in getting better and finishing things you start. Take advantage of opportunities and friends you know who may be experts in the field who can help you. Take time and don’t rush things. Be patient. And if you like doing something, don’t stop because one day you may not be able to do it. If you’re curious about a topic (such as tinnitus for example), study it. Look at it from all angles. Find out for yourself. You may find that you know pretty much everything there is to know.