Blocked Ear

My right ear has decided it is time for a break. Well, perhaps it wasn’t the ear, perhaps it was the substance inside the ear. But if the ear creates the gunk, then maybe it was the ear all along. In any case, the status is the same: my ear is blocked.

I think there is some ocean inside there. I think the sea swam through, towards the canal, and is now taking a nap behind the ear residue. Then maybe the ear is innocent. Maybe this salty water that’s escaped from its home is the cause of the obstruction.

I don’t care for causes, I care for nows. I am half-deaf. Well, only in that half of my listening holes are out of business. But, for the actual intake and recognition of sound, I would say I am 30% deaf.

I can hear most things. I can hear enough to live. There are enough sounds heard that I don’t need to write about it. (I still write about it. I must catalogue. I hoard events. I am monstrous). But it is still a funny feeling.

It is as though it is no longer an ear hole but a black hole. I can feel sound swirl around the entryway, and in the same instant become void and dead and non-existent. When I lay on my open ear, with the blocked ear upright to the world, I feel as though I am underwater. Liquid sounds reach my insides. Tighter particles and hazier rhythms. The same effect occurs when I sit here and push on the rhombus of cartilage of my healthy ear. (You know that cartilage I speak of? It’s that sticky out piece that acts as a door to the ear hole.)

I push the left ear’s cartilage in periods of non-typing. Somehow it makes my right ear hurt. I think the right ear is just after attention. Perhaps I should remove the blasted thing. How about that, Right Ear? How would you like to be detached from the body? Where would you live without the body? I don’t think any other head is going to adopt you. No more pillows to rest on for you. You will decay. So will I. But I think your decay will be more stationary.

As I write this I am lying on a hammock. When I push the little cartilage door closed and shut my eyelids, it is as though I am lounging on a lilo, floating in the middle of the sea, and slowly slowly the lilo is deflating, and slowly slowly, I am submerging, sinking, falling to the ocean floor.

My ear has been blocked before. It’s a bit of a pain when it happens. I’m too relaxed to be energetically aggravated. I am contentedly aggrieved. It is a little bugging. It is no more. This time a writing has been born from it. Parasitic to symbiotic. A stretch? Maybe. I am relaxed, remember, it’s easier to dance with it. Anyway, I’m finished here. Time to float on this lilo a little longer…

11.07.2023