Why did he have multiple ruptured eardrums when he was a child? Was he physically abused?
I'm wondering.
Believe it or not, madam, even though I'm deaf, I never paid attention to problems with the ears; it'd make about as much sense as I paying attention to problems with pregnancy.
"Ruptured eardrums" is just a couple of words to me; I guess I always assumed they were caused by loud blasts of noise, or something.
No way could it've been from abuse, because Skippy came from a poor but decent and civilized background; hard-scrabble farmers in one of the valleys of California. An artichoke or asparagus farm or something that his maternal grandfather owned, usually on the brink of bankruptcy.
His father had deserted his mother, his older sister, and him, and so they went to live with his mother's parents. I dunno what the deal was with his father, as I'm not a snoop, and don't pry. But at any rate, a couple of years ago, when his father was dying, Skippy had a decent and civilized reunion with him; it was very touching, and an awesome thing to have happened.
So Skippy grew up on that dry, desolate farm, and attended a two-room two-teacher country school, which gave him an education more than good enough to get him into the premier engineering and architecture college in the United States, a full-ride scholarship.
Even though his people were poor, they were decent; I can't see any abuse as a child, and so the "ruptured eardrums" were probably caused by something else, although I have no idea what.
However, despite all this, Skippy grew up with one character flaw, that of being easily led by others. While in college in New York City, he fell under the spell of either a woman or a charismatic "international" student, one or the other which washed his brain into mush. He's probably the most extreme far-left of the primitives; to him, Kim Jung-on is, or Idi Amin was, "centrist."
I've been told by those who've heard his voice that he has a slight lisp, and that may have had something to do with this disastrous lack of confidence in himself and his own ideas.
The "undertreated hypertension" is easier to understand. Even though he's hardly svelte, Skippy's far from being substantially overweight. He's a desk-sitting overpaid underworked governmental employee, living a sedentary life.
Add to that a subconscious guilty conscience; he
knows he can be much more than what he is, he should be much more than what he is, and it bothers him that he isn't.
