Texas Re-Attempted: Perforection

I sit in a hospital waiting room, where old women yell the intimate details of their private lives. Some would find it erotic, but as always I stray from the herd. I am here for my hearing test, and as a burly woman shouts "Mr Core-core-an" across the room, I pass the first challenge with flying colours.

They take me to a soundproofed room where a woman asks me three times if she can add my mobile number to my file. It makes me suspicious. Am I doomed now to receive spam calls from the hospital? "Amputate your foot, Sir? STD loyalty card?" I laugh nervously and tell her it's fine. Then she plonks some headphones on me and tells me to press a button whenever I hear something. I consider informing them of my overactive imagination, just to validate the results, but they are already ignoring me.

My hearing checks out fine and the consultant gives me a look of disgust for wasting her time with my ubermensch audio prowess. So as punishment she gets a med student to look in my ears with a giant needle-like device. "Let me know if it hurts," he remarks as he penetrates me. I assure him that I have a healthy aversion to getting my brain pierced. Luckily he doesn't drill too deep, and I am still able to contemplate the finer points of Locke's philosophy as I leave the chamber.

Then they take me to a very nice man with a moustache who is having an argument with a nurse about how to pronounce my surname. He gets it spot on, and I consider giving the old bastard a kiss... but the moustache scares me. He penetrates me like the med student, but he is a gentle and attendant lover. "You have a perforated eardrum," he says, and books me in for a scan. He offers surgery but warns me I could lose my hearing altogether. "Your surgeons aren't too hot then?" I ask. It's probably hard to tell them when it hurts if you're under general anaesthetic.

I leave the hospital with a certain sense of satisfaction (which has nothing to do with the double penetration). Finally I know why my ears pop and why I enter my own little world at the call centre and why I can't hear people in clubs and why my voice sounds perfectly respectable only within the confines of my clicky little head. Doctor Moustache-face says it must be a childhood infection. I wonder if my artistic leanings started at the same time, as the real world of sound and background chatter distorted. One little perforation - an imperfection, a hole, a flaw in the machinery.

If I rack my brains I think the clicking started on my first flight to the States. Perforation can happen on flights, according to Wikipedia.

Cue the usual rationale.

Maybe the United States has always been there to shape the milestones of my life. I fly to Pennsylvania and the trip makes me an artist. I fly to Arizona and see in my uncle the success I crave. I fly to Florida and feel at my physical peak as I swim in the Gulf. I fly to Washington and feel a connection to history like no other.

And now... I fly again to Texas... on the chance of something amazing.

Maybe the perforation's reached my brain.