“You know,†I said, slightly changing the subject, “it appears the big guy in Bellevue, Omaha Steve, always fantasized that he’d get a first-class ticket on board the disability gravy train, and that he’d live the life of Riley, being transported from one Hollywood celebrity convention to another, during which time he’d get to wear one of his outlandish costumes; that he was going to have fun while disabled.
“I don’t think it works that way; to me, if one’s ‘too disabled’ to work, then one’s too disabled to play.
“Being ‘unable to work’ isn’t the same thing as being able to romp around without a care in the world; as you can see, while I
look absolutely normal, really, I’m never going to be able to run around simply to have fun the rest of my life.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
“But anyway, to get back to the original topic, which isn’t God, but Reality.
“While keeping in mind of course that Reality allows, and in fact, proves the existence of God.
“Reality is Infinite, while the human ability to see and understand is finite.
“No matter how ‘advanced’ we become, we don’t know shit.â€
I shoved the paperwork over to her. “Read, please, the comments of the otolaryntologist, the ear-nose-throat spcialist who intimately inspected me. This was the first time she’d ever seen me, although she did have the long detailed report from a professional audiologist beforehand.
“As she kept looking inside my head, she seemed to get more and more confused.
“Finally, she sat down, sat back, and stared at me.
“’It doesn’t make sense,’ she commented; ‘you appear to have
some hearing, but at the same time you’ve got nothing to hear with; no ear canals, no inner ears, no ear-drums, no anything else required to hear.
“’Of course you barely hear, but you ‘hear.’
“’Now, how do you do that?’
“Of course it was simply a rhetorical question, and really, while she acted surprised, I suspect I wasn’t a phenomenon she hadn’t seen before. She’d seen it before, but never could explain it.
“And since she couldn’t understand it, she
really didn’t want to bother with it.
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“I’ve been through this all my life, beginning with my father, an allied medical professional, an eminently ‘scientific,’ rational, reasoning, logical thinking person who, because science and reasoning said so, insisted the only way one could ‘hear’ was through sounds coming through the air and bouncing onto ear-drums.
“That was the
only way; anything else was just silly old wives’ tales.
“And much of the time I was growing up, and way into the middle of adulthood, it seemed both the medical and scientific consensus was that this was it, the
only way to hear.
“As I got older, I begged to differ; for various reasons from about the time I was three years old until this part year, I’d been inspected by physicians specializing in hearing, and professional audiologists at least once a year, never any less, and while it all of course was minimal, next to nothing, betrayed ample evidence that I could ‘hear.’
“So when this particular physician asked me what I thought, I told her—‘well, maybe there’s more than one way to hear, to absorb sound, but since they can’t make sense of it, nobody’s ever looked into it.
“Actually, there’s probably dozens, scores, hundreds, of ways to hear, but it’s too much for finite human brains to understand. The prevailing dogma is that one can hear only through vibrations of sound bouncing off ear-drums, and since that
seems to apply in 99.99% of all cases, it’s the truth, the only truth, and anything else is nonsense.
“Just as it used to be ‘established science’ that the earth was flat, or the sun revolved around this planet, or God doesn’t exist.
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“I have no idea how I ‘hear,’ whatever I ‘hear.’ Notice she writes I ‘hear’ only because I imagine I hear.
“Which might have
some validity; after all, I grew up under intense pressure to show that I ‘got’ something, to show that I ‘understood’ something, and so it was inevitable I’d acquire the habit of imagining things even if I hadn’t actually heard them.
“And I’m wrong often enough it’s pretty obvious that’s going on.
“But that’s not the whole answer. I can reasonably imagine sounds if I’m seeing something, but it doesn’t explain how I imagine them if I don’t see something, such as when sitting in the darkened booth of an audiologist.
“I think there’s more than one way to hear, but because ‘rational’ ‘thinking’ ‘logical’ ‘scientific’ minds tend to settle upon one specific idea, rejecting all other ideas as preposterous, we’re never going to know.
“In the meantime, one accepts it without even trying to understand it, and thanks God.â€
that’s it, the whole story; I’m mystified as to the point I’d hoped to make, but I hope I made a point
