Hot Day and the AC Don't Work Right

Hola blogistas! Sorry again for not writing. I’ve been busy writing my book and even more busy thinking about writing my book. Fascinating, I know, but it doesn’t really lend itself to exciting blog entries. And actually it’s not all that fascinating. Writing, when you get down to it, is sitting in a room trying to hold off another five minutes before checking your email. Which, as long as we’re being honest, pretty much describes what I did when I worked at a law firm two years ago. Probably why they laid me off. But I did take my unemployment check and head up to my friend Gary’s barn in rural Maine and write the first chapters of the book. I have no point here.

Sometimes, I do get in a groove and enjoy the writing. When I started, my goal was to honor my friends in Zambia, the villagers who gave so freely of everything they had. And the book is still about them – but it’s grown to become an exploration of the many aspects of the experience of deafness.

Unlike this blog. This is usually just about the cheap laugh.

Take, for example, the experience of silence. A deaf person can change the volume of the world just by flicking his hearing aid or implant switch. Noisy, silent, noisy, silent. So a two part question: first, what does it mean that everything around you, every single person, every single object can, with a switch, be given the same exact voice? What is real then? When things are different or when they’re the same? And second, now that you’ve considered that, what if your hearing aids got stolen off a Tanzanian beach while you were dogpaddling in the ocean, in the grips of wicked Malaria hallucinations?


Tough one, eh? Truth is stranger than fiction and the fruth is stranger than both. Don't fret it, just bring a spare hearing aid.

Meanwhile, they keep blowing all their shit up.