Whither SEK? Also, more importantly, happy birthday LGM and donate, donate, donate

Birthdays are a good excuse to get back in touch with old friends, so I figure why not now? But before I do so, remember to donate, we’re not all starving, but you know me, I’m an incident away from living in gutter, so donate. As for where I’ve been, of course there’s my day job in which I help ruin once pristine institutions, and there’s the big divorce and big move and big surgery, but what I haven’t mentioned here is that the big surgery apparently led to something which is utterly real but sounds invented — sudden deafness.

The treatment for this is a steroid regimen that has prevented me from eating solid foods for a few weeks now, and not that I want to contradict Rob, but some of us are indeed starving. (Albeit for a good cause.) So for those of you wondering where the Game of Thrones podcasts went, now you know. Steven’s not actually predictable enough that I don’t need to listen to what he says to respond, so I’ve been useless.

Less than useless, actually, for verging on a month or more now. But one of the things I did do when I thought the steroids wouldn’t work and I’d be deaf forever was compulsively listen to and write about my favorite music, and even though it looks like I’ll be hearing again for the foreseeable future, I thought I might share/you might enjoy some of my musings, and since it’s my blog too (sort of) here we go:

I’ve been told, repeatedly, that I was a quiet child, which makes sense given that I couldn’t hear a god damn thing. Apparently, the first thing I heard was the sound of the car on the road on the way back from the hospital after having yet another set of tubes placed in my ears. I said something, sort of, in the way deaf children do, and my mother cried. That’s the story I know.

But there’s another story, not about hearing but about feeling — in particular, about feeling music. I had a Fisher-Price phonograph and a copy of “The Muppet Movie” soundtrack, so I knew each of Kermit’s banjo plucks because I could feel them through the player. My father played Simon & Garfunkel all the time, so I knew the BIG DRUMS in “The Boxer” and looked forward to feeling them move through me more than I can say.

So it shouldn’t be surprising that despite the heady whiffs of colonialism and cultural appropriation, when I first heard the first track on Paul Simon’s “Rhythm of the Saints” in 1995 or so — well after it was released, I was a pretentious music dickhead previously — I couldn’t help but be struck down, nearly to tears, if by “nearly” you mean “Yeah, I was.”

The BIG DRUMS of my youth were multiplied over a track that actually spoke to me at that moment in my life, in the void between high school and college, because it was a reflection of a moment I wouldn’t have for years — “Sonny’s yearbook from high school is down from the shelf / And he idly thumbs through the pages / Some have died / Some have fled from themselves” — because that’s what I was planning to do, flee from myself into LSU’s Middleton Library and become a person no one thought I could be.

I realize now, in retrospect, that line doesn’t carry the optimism I once thought it did, but that doesn’t really matter — I had BIG DRUMS, I had a mission, and it made me, in some small way, the asshole I am today.