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A small, gaudy beach house coffee cup heaped with Ben & Jerry's Jamaican Me Crazy sorbet (pineapple sorbet with passion fruit swirl...) with a splash of Barbancourt 8 year old Haitian rum is a wonderful thing.
And chased with a fantastically cold Red Stripe beer pulled out of one of the coolers on the porch?
Sublime.
WiFi is a marvelous thing.
I'm sitting on the porch of a beach house on Tybee Island, Georgia; just east of Savannah. It's early evening and the tide is coming in with the sunset. We're about 50 yards from the beach. There's a great breeze blowing in, and my brother Chris is sitting here at the table recovering from a simple dinner of burgers on the grill. It's a little jarring actually being here after the last week.
In addition to getting the hearing aids, I've left the employ of the Club. In fact, you could say I've simply left employ of everything for the time being.
Frankly, after 20 years, the Chef thing has gotten real old. I've decided to drop the whole concept of cooking for a living, and try to move on to something else. Let's call it a midlife crisis, wherein I'm totally aware that the crisis is going on, and I'm not screwing the secretary and buying a Ferrari. Not that I've ever had a secretary or could afford a Ferrari, but you get the picture.
Now Chris has gone off somewhere, and Mom and The Lady have sat down with me. Susan is behind me on a bench with Suzie the cat, who lives next door, but seems to have adopted us for the duration.
And this is the secret of me having a midlife crisis. Getting to know my family again. I haven't seen Mom in ages, and The Lady has had to deal with my stress on an ongoing basis. I'm down at the beach getting some of the best therapy available, surrounding myself with those who love me. They've been incredibly supportive of my without-a-net act. They've been watching me go a little nuts for awhile now.
The plan, as it stands, is to chill, enjoy two weeks here at Tybee and Savannah, visit with friends up north and breath easy for the rest of the summer. Come fall, I'm going to enroll in a viticulture certificate program at the local community college, and see where that meanders. Mostly, I think it's time to go back to school and try do deal with some unfinished business. Why not? I'll have some time on my hands. I'll supplement with a few part time jobs, but who knows what I'll be doing.
I'm just tired of worrying about it.
My last day at the club was pretty difficult, nonetheless. Laura has been a great chef to work for, and I truly did hate to leave such a good kitchen staff. But I think they understand that I had great issues with the Women Upstairs, and that I could no longer abide the craziness. So, Friday was the last day.
The Lady and I spent the next few days packing and preparing. We went to a fantastic B-52's concert Sunday night, and left C'ville from there, driving through thunderstorms as far as Rocky Mount, North Carolina, where we holed up for the night in a a rather poor motel room.
We got here yesterday afternoon, and brought some brutal storms with us. I did some cooking on the grill last night - I was determined to use a grill, dammit - in a torrential downpour which turned into a king hell thunderstorm which lasted for hours. We all went to bed with it raging around us. I slept deeply and dreamless; the sleep of exhaustion and relief.
I got up around 4:50 this morning and realized the power was out. My cousin Susan couldn't sleep, either, so the we walked down to the beach in the moonlight in the hour before dawn. The whole island was out and dark and still, with the exception of a couple of early walkers like ourselves, we had the beach to ourselves. The only lights where the moon, the stars, some ships out to sea and the Tybee Roads channel lights to the north of the island. More new sounds for the the Chef. Surf fizzes. I heard the flutter of gulls wings as they suspended themselves above us in the breeze as the dawn entered our awareness. Sound is so detailed and immediate. Susan and I talked a bit, but mostly we enjoyed the moment; looking out to sea with Tybee behind us, dark and silent.
Well, I think I'll move inside. Getting dark out here, and some of Tybee's fabled sand gnats have decided that I'm pretty tasty.
While I'm down here, look out for some food and drink blogging. I've got the camera, and I'll post some pics here soon.
In the meantime, y'all take it easy. I know I will.
Clever bit of design. It's a knife with a retro bike handlebar grip
For what they are, they're way overpriced. But they are fun to look at.
(tip 'o' the hat: Uncrate)
At some point when I was a child, it became apparent that I was a bit different to the other kids. Namely, I couldn't hear the things they heard.
This was somewhat expected, my mother being hearing impaired. I stepped into this life with the genetic code that dialed me down a notch or so when it came to sound. A childhood of constant ear infections only increased the damage.
At around 10 years, I was fitted with my first hearing aid; a single behemoth hanging off the back of my right ear. Not good for a kid in a school going though desegregation in a southern Virginia town.
It was a primitive device, but it was pretty amazing to me, even though I despised it. It was a simple amplification device, nothing more. It was expensive and delicate and a general pain for a kid to wear, but it was important to my folks, so I wore it. getting fitted for it was sort of fun; I got to sit in a soundproof booth and take a hearing test. I decided that this was a space capsule. It was dark, silent, enclosed; cut off from the world with just a single window out onto a control center manned by the audiologist.
I went through various combinations of hearing aids; right or left, power up or down.
Teenage years came and went, and so did the hearing aids. The sound was just too much. Straight volume; everything way too loud, with no discrimination. What's the good of hearing everything and not being able to sort it all out.
I'd had enough of them. I was tired of them. To a young man, they were an albatross of social stigma.
At around 26, I decided to give them another shot. Cosmetically, they had improved. They had been able to miniaturize the thing so it would fit sort of inside the ear. They were better than they had been, but were far more delicate. Mere sweat could fry these poor creatures. And they did.
Twenty years later, I took yet another chance. My parents and The Lady were worried that the world was passing me by. It was, in so many ways. I missed so much. Conversations in groups were mysteries wherein I was too embarrassed to confess my ignorance. Instead, I would learn tone, and follow the flow of the conversation. When people would laugh, then so would I. But I rarely heard the punchline.
So, another set of hearing aids. But this time, there was a marked improvement; the sound quality was far better, and there was a switchable program for two different environments. This was more like it. The aids were fickle, more expensive than ever and over the long term, very troublesome. But I stuck with them. I had to. I had reached over the threshold of being 50% hearing impaired. I was now dependent on those hearing aids just to get through the day and to earn a living.
Sounds were still mostly just amplified and just loud. But that was better than the alternative. So, I kept on keeping on, missing the world around me. Missing so much.
Recently, I became clear that it was time to get new hearing aids. The ones I got 5 years ago were giving up the ghost, and it was great trepidation that I went to the audiologist.
Once again, I sat in my space capsule.
The test was about what I expected; continued deterioration across the spectrum of around 5 dB. Ah, well. I'm used to it by now.
I had decided to get the finest aid available for my needs, and was ready to shell out the bucks for it. I didn't get my hopes up. After all, there was a lifetime of bittersweet memory ready to pursue me.
But then, something different happened.
In the last five years, the technology went sort of nuts.
The audiologist took the results of my test and input them into a program on her Dell laptop and dialed up the brands and models of aids that would apply to me.
Oh. Behind the ear. Damn, I thought. Come full circle, have I? Then the nice lady showed me what she had in mind.
The thing was an inch long and little over a quarter inch thick, with a very thin tube encasing a wire that attached to a transmitter in the form of flexible silicone earbud. No more ear molds.
She told me it was fully digital. Huh?
How long will they take to get ready, I asked.
Oh, we can do that right now. I do everything right here in the office. On this computer.
I asked how. She said, well, let's just do it, ok? That's the best way to show you.
She took out two aids, prepped them and popped them in my ears. At this point, The Lady was there watching.
She plugged the hearing aids into the laptop through a miniature data port in each device. I was hooked into her computer, with various clicks and snippets of sound breaking though the silence, as she set the programs for the various channels with which this device would service me.
Then she looked at me and said, hold on.
In my left ear, a sound like a starship engine cranking up blasted into my world, repeated in my right a moment later. Then silence. Then a little digital melody best described as a light variation on the Intel theme.
And then humming.
And I asked, what's that?
She smiled, and looked at The Lady. Say something, she said.
The Lady gave me a little look and said, Hey sweetie. And she started reading from a poster in the office.
I almost started crying.
I'd never heard her before. Not like this. Not this way. Not to the point of being almost normal. Her voice was pure sparkling clarity and oh so sweet.
I turned to the audiologist who said, the humming is the light fixtures overhead. I looked up and it occurred to me that the world was opening up in waves around me within this tiny office. I could hear the secretary a room away on the phone and the printer printing and a phone ringing behind me, and I knew right were it was.
It was overwhelming. I was like a child in a sonic candy store, grasping this way and that; lurching after sounds. Sounds that I could never have imagined in my wildest dream.
Sounds the rest of the world takes for granted.
That was 2 days ago. This morning, I picked up the aids after the requisite transfer of funds was completed. Essentially the cost of 3 very powerful laptops sit nearly invisible on and behind my ears, replicating the power of those very computers, analyzing sound to a degree that will continue to bogle my mind.
I have an automatic default setting that screens out sounds that are not of use to me if I don't need to pay attention. I went to work this morning with them, and as I walked along the kitchen's hot line, the sound of the hood fans faded out as I walked to the cook to ask him what his specials were today. I could actually talk to him on the line without the hoods drowning out the conversation.
On my way home, I was trying out the "music" channel on the car radio; switching back and forth between stations. A Spanish waltz here, new alternative there and Roger Daltrey wailing out on Who Are You to depths and highs I never knew existed.
I think for the first time, I really understand where Bill is coming from on the concept of singularity. In the mere passage of days, my life has blasted into another dimension; one where insects buzz, cats purr softly and tree frogs sound like an apocalypse of joy and sensation. Where a pair of devices smaller than the first joint of my pinkie whispers to me the leaves of trees in a summer evening breeze as I walk across the street to Domaine Mojo.
The future is hear.
UPDATE:
Ok. Lots of you are asking about the aids themselves in the comments, both here and at Daily Pundit, as well as through email. BTW, my email is chefmojo-at-earthlink.net. Feel free to drop me a line, and I'll try to answer any specific questions you might have. In the meantime, however, I think I should try to anticipate some of those questions.
Keeping in mind, that this is reflective of my experience and your mileage may vary...
The hearing aids I have are Phonak microPower.
They are not inexpensive, but to me, they're worth every penny. They also have a future. What I'm trying to say is that because they are digital and programmable, I can take them in every now and then to get them tweaked, according to what my hearing is doing and the specific needs I have for them. Also, there are no controls on the aids themselves. Volume and channel control come via a nifty little remote control that goes on my keychain. I chose to go with a non earmold style with silicone "earbuds." I find them far more comfortable than the molds. One's ear canal, like other parts of the body, changes constantly, and the silicone is snug but flexible to bodily changes.
And while I'm at it, I'd like to send a big shout out to Marian Fredner at Albemarle Audiology for guiding me through this. She was up front, honest and professional as all get out. Completely informative. No slight of hand and no pressure tactics. How refreshing to interact with someone like that.
It's been a helluva ride...
(crossposted at Daily Pundit)
I was on my way home from work yesterday, listening to the radio, when the strangest thing happened.
I had it on the local AM station, listening to end of the Rush Limbaugh broadcast. Cut to commercials. The usual stuff.
All of a sudden, there's a commercial for the new Queens of the Stone Age album. Talk about your things that make you go WTF? And then it was on to the station PSAs.
QOTSA advertising on AM radio during Rush? I'm still trying to twist that one around my brain.
Funny thing is, it worked.
You see, I didn't know that QOTSA had released a new album. Now I know, and I'll order it.
Another observation. Is it just me, or have CD prices tumbled down drastically of late? Amazon has this album at $9.99, which is what you'd pay for it on iTunes. If this is now the case, then iTunes looks a bit less attractive. I would much rather have the hard copy in the case of music. And why download an inferior sampling, when I can load the CD in at a higher rate?
I'm hoping something good comes of Live Earth, Al Gore's global revival meeting concert extravaganza.
If it turns out that this is the fitful twitching of the '60s before it shuffles off this mortal coil into the vale of complete irrelevancy, then it will have done a great service.
While cruising the blogosphere this morning (Interesting aside: My automatic spellcheck in Firefox just flagged "blogosphere." Ok. Added to the dictionary...), I'm finding lots of amusing stuff about Live Earth, including one piece in which Reverend Al invokes the prophet Bob:
The Live Earth concerts, which start this Saturday, July 7, are also one last chance for Baby Boomers to relive the “flower power” activism of the ’60s. In a recent interview in Rolling Stone, former Vice President Al Gore invoked music icon Bob Dylan to promote the importance of these concerts. Citing Dylan’s ‘60 anthem “The Times They Are A-Changin’”. Gore rambled: “What’s the old Bob Dylan line? ‘Come senators, congressmen, please heed the call/Rattle your windows’ - what’s the rest of it? - ‘for the times they are a-changin’.”
But there’s just one problem with invoking Dylan to hype the global warming scare. And that is that Dylan himself has expressed skepticism — to the same magazine — to the notion that global warming is a catastrophe. When he was asked by Rolling Stone founder and publisher Jann Wenner in the magazine’s 40th anniversary issue if he worried about global warming, Dylan replied with an unexpected rejoinder. He asked Wenner, “Where’s the global warming? It’s freezing here.” Wenner, who has blanketed Rolling Stone and his other magazine Men’s Journal with doom-and gloom climate change stories (that often bash CEI), quickly moved on to other topics after he received his comeuppance.
Yet Dylan’s latest statement may signal that in the global warming debate, the times are changing. Even independent-minded celebrities are now questioning the establishment media orthodoxy that the debate over global warming and its effects are all but over. In a phrase familiar to those who study pop culture, it appears that the global warming scare may have “jumped the shark.”
(emphasis mine)
I love Dylan. Dylan can say stuff like that, and Jann Wenner, grinding his teeth, has to print it because it's Bob Dylan. Bob is a walking, living, breathing hypocrisy barometer. Needless to say, Bob is not hanging out with Reverend Al today.
Here's hoping that this is the high water mark of Reverend Al's Apocalyse Now. Half filled arenas and stadiums featuring musicians, actors and politicians howling out in mass hysteria the likes of which we haven't seen since the Great Tulip Bubble of 1637. But this isn't an economic phenomenon so much as an attempt to create a religion with all its attendant dogma out of whole cloth, slyly co-opting junk science and false reason to achieve it's aims.
Well, Al, let's throw a little Bob back to you, shall we?
As some warn victory, some downfall
Private reasons great or small
Can be seen in the eyes of those that call
To make all that should be killed to crawl
While others say don't hate nothing at all
Except hatred.Disillusioned words like bullets bark
As human gods aim for their mark
Made everything from toy guns that spark
To flesh-colored Christs that glow in the dark
It's easy to see without looking too far
That not much
Is really sacred.While preachers preach of evil fates
Teachers teach that knowledge waits
Can lead to hundred-dollar plates
Goodness hides behind its gates
But even the president of the United States
Sometimes must have
To stand naked.
That's one thing from the 60's that'll never lose relevancy...
(via Malkin and cross posted at Daily Pundit)
