A Squirt Gun to Cleanse My Soul

This morning, when I was deaf, I had no idea that the hollow-bodied medical debris which has been lying in my desk drawer for the past four years would be the door, as it were, of my perceptions, the key to forever transcending my physical limitations. But life has its surprises; and I, thanks to today’s momentous circumstances, now have my squirt gun syringe.

The occasion of my momentous discovery of this powerful tool was my sudden, total, and seemingly irremediable deafness; the time, this morning.

I haven’t always been deaf, you know. Just today. Apparently, I slept on the left side of my head last night, and all the brain juices that were trying to ooze out my ear got stuck inside it like an endangered species in the Hoover Dam. I’ve managed to avoid this happening in the past, because I usually alternate the side I sleep on every couple of hours so that I don’t grow a kidney-stone. One of my friends had a kidney-stone in college, and after that, I’m almost cheery about setting an alarm in the middle of the night to remind me to turn over. But yesterday, I suffered minor abrasions to my right heel when I tried to ride a brakeless bicycle down a flight of stairs, so last night I drank extra cranberry juice, stuck to the left side, and suffered the consequences.

All in all, it was probably a good thing that the expulsions of my ear canal didn’t make it onto the pillowcase. My wife is sort of anal about sheets and pillow-dressings, and the wax probably would have ruined her iron. It was hard for me to take this dispassionate view at the beginning, of course, since it sounded like I had woken up with my head in a coffin. And it was hard to get used to my four-sensed state. Since external sources of sound were cut off from my reposing left ear drum, when I brushed my teeth after breakfast, I thought for a second that someone had turned on a tablesaw in my mouth.

I was all right for most of the morning, since I usually just sit around on the internet all day and clip my toenails, but when I started relying on my tongue to tell me if the toast had popped up yet, I realized I needed to reclaim my hearing, post-haste. Q-tips only compacted the obstruction, tamping it down against my ear-drum like a ramrod in a cannon. A damp Kleenex twisted into a sharp, moist point merely made my neck soggy. I was dismantling a package of ball point pens in order to construct a mouth-operated vacuum tube when I suddenly remembered the syringe tucked away softly in my desk drawer.

See, this secretion problem thing must be genetic, because my mom sometimes has the same problem. Even though it’s been a while since I took her advice, I remembered vaguely her stories about doctors jetting warm water into her ears in order to soak out the auditory impasses lodged within.

She seemed to think it was a good idea, so I tried it on myself, armed with only my three-cent syringe and the modern miracle of running water. Innumerable squirts and a bathroom sink later, consummation and delight! Only ten minutes and a wet orifice in exchange for high-definition surround sound!

My hearing is now hyper-sensitive, and getting more so all the time. At three o’clock, I heard my wife thinking that her iron was getting dirty, and at four, I heard Rudolf Hess chewing a peppermint at the Nuremberg trials. By this evening, I’ll probably be able to hear a blind caveman seeing.

And it’s all because of my syringe. I strongly suggest that you purchase one of your own, and several for your car trunk, in case of a terrorist attack. With such obvious healing powers at its disposal, who knows what a syringe can’t do?

I don’t know about you, but I’m going to strap mine to my kidneys tonight while I’m asleep.