Me, posturing with my comment, trying to seem smart on a smart person’s blog:

The detritus from abandoned blogs and terminated online relationships makes my last 12 years hard to revisit. I felt like some of those bloggers were among my best friends until one day they disappeared for good. I often think about looking them up, but I realize that because they vanished, they may want to stay lost. I wonder who will mourn when I log off for good.

Bill wrote about a disappeared blogger. About reaching out and receiving a disappointing reply. He wrote about other stuff too, but the lost friend part hit home. It made me want to respond. The attrition is endless. They leave for Substack. They become bored. Their muse takes flight. They birth a baby. They lose their voice. They get a life. Whatever. They vanish. Usually, it takes time. They write less. They read less. They take a break. They return months later promising to do better and then evaporate entirely.

I miss them. Do they miss me? My early days of writing featured vulnerability—newfound sobriety, growing insight into my Tourette, my OCD, my anxiety and depression. I cut myself open and spilled out prose. Those I read did the same. We built a community of injured souls. We understood and supported one another. I’m not sure how I would have succeeded without them.

One by one, they disappear. At first, I usually don’t notice. One day I think, “Huh, when was the last time Robyn commented on a post. When was the last time she liked one.” I check her blog and see she hasn’t written in weeks. She never posted again.

In time, others took her place, but they fell away as well. And then more. My desire to look them up—cyberstalk them, google their email and drop them a line—comes in waves. A strong one now, obviously, writing these thoughts. I once met up with Robyn at a trail race. We had so much in common. The running, of course, and punk music. Social anxiety. Autism—her son (definitely) and me (possibly). Plus, Gettysburg, her husband is a history nut.

She told me her family once took a photo outside the library where I work. She tried to guess which window was mine. She didn’t come in, social anxiety and all. The time we met was awkward. We tried to talk while we ran. Our paces mismatched. Me, out of breath, Robyn, itching to run ahead. Coffee would have worked better, assuming a pair of social misfits can hold a conversation.

One day I’ll quit blogging. I won’t fade away like most. I’ll drop out cold turkey. White knuckles, like I did with alcohol. To others, it will seem abrupt, but I’m sure I’ll have agonized over the decision for months. Will you notice? Will you reach out? Ask if I’m all right? Tell me what I meant to you… if anything? Blogging, I think, is dying. Different media, newer media is taking over. I suspect each of us will bail eventually. Find different hobbies, different ways to express ourselves. Or not. Possibly some of us will simply mourn one more lost bit of our lives.

Photo from Pixabay

Last weekend I bought new hearing aids. Well, I bought them weeks ago, but I had to wait for this past weekend for them to arrive. This is my third pair. I started wearing them eight years ago, and each pair died in exactly four years. Since 2017, I’ve dropped six thousand dollars trying to hear the people around me speak.

As an added annoyance, I buy my hearing aids from Costco. It’s a fifty-minute drive from my house, and I need to purchase a special annual membership to even enter the building. I typically go on the weekend. Every visit, it’s a sea of oversized SUVs jockeying for parking spaces or just trying to get the hell out of the massive traffic jam of a parking lot. It’s a hassle, but each time I buy new hearing aids, Consumer Reports ranks Costco’s models as the best, the cheapest, with the best customer service. In contrast, my father’s last pair, bought from the boutique hearing center Miracle Ear, cost over seven thousand dollars.

It’s been four years since I bought a Costco membership.

Sales lady: “You can buy a Gold Membership for sixty-five dollars, or you can buy a Platinum Membership for one-hundred thirty-five dollars.

Me: “I’ll buy the Gold.”

“Wait, with the Platinum Membership, you get two-percent cash back on purchases up to twenty-five-hundred dollars. Since you’re buying a big-ticket item, you’ll actually save money with the Platinum.”

I pulled out my phone and punched numbers into the calculator app. “Two percent of twenty-five-hundred is fifty dollars. I’ll still lose money.” The sales lady gave me a smile that seemed to say Thank you for figuring that out, I feel horrible about ripping off people all day, all week, all year.

The woman who fitted my hearing aids warned me that they would take a few weeks to get used to. She got that right. It’s so much easier now to hear and distinguish voices, but where my hearing aids really excel is picking up clatter.

Clatter (n): a continuous rattling sound as of hard objects falling or striking each other.

When I was a teenager, I frequently came home from my nighttime restaurant job stoned. My parents slept lightly, and some nights, they got out of bed to check on me as I settled down for a snack and some late-night TV. I had to hold it together for those few minutes of conversation so they wouldn’t figure out I was high. I quickly learned it was best not to wake them. I crept around the kitchen, silently fixing my snack, every tiny noise—the microwave closing, the metal ice cream scoop set into the sink—sounded like a bomb exploding.

My new hearing aids remind me of this. In the morning, as I make my lunch before heading off to work, I grab a bag of pretzel sticks from the pantry and wrestle to open the bag for the first time. The stiff plastic, designed to tear all the way down the side of the bag and spill out half the pretzels at some point before I finish eating the contents, crackles so loudly (in my hearing aids) you would think I had a clothes dryer in my kitchen spinning a case of broken beer bottles.

When I fetch a scoopful of ice from my freezer and dump it into my water glass, I’m reminded of the Coca Cola commercial that plays at one-hundred decibels through the Dolby Surround Sound^® system at my movie theater. The cat chomping his kibble, water running in the sink, the creaks and snaps of hardwood floors, the air escaping a fresh bottle of club soda, each of these causes such a racket that I wince. The volume of these sounds is almost comical, like something you’d see in a campy horror movie where the teenagers need to keep quiet to save their own lives.

I’m supposed to get used to this over the next couple of weeks. My brain will somehow quiet these sounds so they aren’t so prominent, so painful to my ears. While I want to say that’s impossible to believe, I remember visiting Susan’s grandparents when we first started dating. I woke up five times each night with passing trains. Nothing is so clatter-some as train wheels on train tracks at three in the morning. I commented to her grandmother that she must be exhausted all the time from interrupted sleep. She said, “Oh, I don’t hear those trains anymore. I haven’t heard them for years.”

Maybe we all ‘hear’ this clatter all the time, but our brains have learned to selectively adjust the volume to make it less disruptive. Maybe as an intoxicated teen, I heard those sounds at their actual level because I gave them my full attention (and because I was paranoid and high). Now, my hearing aids include all sorts of phone-app activated settings to filter out background noise. I suppose this would be a simple short-term solution, but my brain won’t learn anything that way. I’ll endure the clatter until it magically goes away.

~ ~ ~

A Bonus Post?

A couple days ago, I stressed about not blogging in over two weeks. Awake at two a.m., after banishing my cat from my bedroom before he started his wee-hours-of-the-morning routine of poking my elbow with a claw and then hiding under the bed, I conjured this potential mini blog post, thinking it was funny, thinking I was clever.

English is Weird:
My feed’s gone stale, my blog seems dead,
so here’s a verse for you to read.

I thought I touched a universal nerve about homophones requiring context to pronounce the words correctly, and what happens when dual contexts conflict? The next day, I realized how stupid this was. I wrote it down but kept it to myself. Until now.