Enough about that, I learned later that I had lessened hearing in my right ear (I think, it’s still a bit confusing…), after a test after the sound in my ears had stopped being in the way of it. Oddly enough I forgot which ear it was that had reduced hearing, and it’s not really crossed my mind a whole lot (though there has been moments of “Eh, wut u SAY?!” and I’ve tilted my head (the right side) towards the person). That’s not really the point either, because those moments are fleeting, passed in the blink of an eye, and then it’s past. Which this moment was too, but this moment really struck me.

Somehow I had managed to fuck up the sound settings on my computer. When talking on Skype the speaker on the other end could hear themselves from me through some magical means in the settings. That left me to mute a whole buttload of channels by the elimination method while yelling into the Sound Recorder (while it’s probably a whole lot more fun to shout at other people, I doubt they’d subscribe to it).

During my fuckup moment I had managed to flip the balance to the left ear without thinking/noticing. Shit, that’s not a problem, right? So I go through the settings trying to find the right one that I messed up (for some reason I was in dumbass-mode this evening, so it took me some time). Eventually I find it, grinning at me. Damned slider.

Moving it with grace and precision towards the middle I quickly found myself pushing it beyond the middle, just messing around. For some reason my left was hearing worse than the right, so I pushed it back in the direction from whence it came. It was awesome. The sound was balanced. I think. This is where confusion comes into the picture - after an hour or so it felt like I had lessened hearing on the other side again! So I turned it towards the right, but was that right? Nope, that felt decidedly weird. Really weird, so back it goes, and then the whole unbalanced feeling comes back again. Which is it that’s right? Left? Neither? I’m still not sure. I feel a bit lessened on the left now that I have it in the middle, but I’m not sure.

This shit’s messed up, and I’ll figure it out eventually. Might it be some balancing thing in my ear that went the way of the Dodo? Meh, confused. It was right, right?

So I bought the SteelSeries 5H v2 USB a while ago, and the soundscape (is that the word?) makes me able to listen to music for extended periods of time, talk to friends on Skype with no trouble at all, and play games where I seemingly hear everything in clear details! I was really happy with this baby, it even felt really awesome to have on my head due to cushions that never gets sweaty or uncomfortable. Being able to pull out the microphone is pretty damned w00t as well.

My life was so nice and great for a while. Then one side decided that some crappy connection was to become ailing, and every now and then the right side disconnects, completely or partially. How’s that for awful. Then I send a letter to komplett.no telling them of the problem, and they want me to send it in so they can check it out. That’s a month ago. Now, I really want to use those headphones again, because they made sound a whole lot more awesome, but for some reason packing it up and shipping it off seems like a mountain to overcome. I never understood why that is so until now.

Ordering a product is easy. A few clicks, some typing, WHABAM, you’ve ordered something. All you need to do is pick it up, and you feel like it’s christmas (just a whole lot better, because you know you’re getting something you want, instead of that stupid plastic angel from some obscure relative). Sending it off again on the other hand, now there’s an obstacle. Why the hell is it so difficult to get off my ass to send it, when I know it’s so freakin’ easy? BAH!

It doesn’t require an effort. It just requires you to do something that doesn’t excite you in any way. There’s no insane need for this product, so there’s no desperation present either. I suppose I should get off my ass this evening and get it shipped off. Question is, will I?

I might just like the attention atleast, and posts never feel pointless that way. I don’t feel guilty about not posting, curiously enough, I just feel good about people visiting. New, or old readers, I can’t say I know, and I’m not entirely sure if it’s important. So whether or not it’s anything interesting or remotely cool to read has nothing to do with it, as long as I try to keep up a modicum of quality. The quality isn’t there for just you, the readers, as much as it’s there for me, the writer, so I won’t fall into the evil pits of internet lingo retardism where I butcher some poor language with a dull baseball bat with a nail-gun attached to it. Which is something I strive for, not the molesting of a language, even though I can be forgetful, ignorant and lazy, but I will try to maintain a certain standard, or some minuscule amount of quality to what I write. That can be in the form of pictures, links, grammar, spelling, topic or variety. Who knows.

Yet it’s not a conscious choice how I want to write a post, or what I want to fill it with, atleast not in the beginning, because usually the beginning is a massive mess of random thoughts I hammer down before I forget them. Or decide to do something else, or maybe a new thought’d pop up in my head, because I get easily sidetracked. Very easily. I had a massive backlog of about 16 posts, most of them scrapped now because they were outdated or uninteresting to me, only a month ago. Sometimes it crosses my mind to do something about them, post them regardless of time or interest, but I’ve come to the point where I realize that those posts generally tend to fall apart because I’m not really putting anything into it, it just turns generic.

When I do that I kind of cross that gulf where I feel I’m sacrificing quality of content to blog-output, and I have a hard time justifying it. Which doesn’t mean that all the posts I’ve posted are quality, pure and simple. Far from it, but if they lack quality of every kind, I’ve atleast been motivated, regardless of state of mind. Sometimes that can turn my posts into heaps of crap though, states of mind. I can be restless and eager to write it out as fast as possible, or I can be slow and careful when writing. Fast posts are usually the ones I look back on and think that I should perhaps have slowed down and saved them for later, when I can look through it carefully. They tend to lack the quality, though they’ve got plenty of motivation. It’s a tricky balance, because they might end up in the heap if I take too long as well. On the other side, those are usually the ones I enjoyed the most to write.

It might be stupid as hell, but this messy crap I just wrote was a load of fun. I’ll use the word maybe again, that I may do this again sometime in the future. Maybe. It was fun, and I wrote fast and carefully avoid making the post look like shit. Just writing whatever’s on my mind right there and then.

This one happened on a wintery night in Modalen, with roads filled with wet snow that made it slick as hell. A young man, that would be me, is heading home from a football-training and a short drop-in at Kjartan’s to say hi and talk crap about anything and everything. The road is, as mentioned, pretty messed up from the wet snow, so our young man, still me, decides to not go at it gung-ho style like he usually does when he’s driving these roads, because the last thing he wants is for shit to hit fans, because he hates messes, and particularly cleaning them up.

Driving up the valley at a decent pace quickly turns boring, but in his wisdom he takes a break-test to see how bad the road actually is. It’s bad. Really bad. So bad that he’s not bored anymore, he’s being really careful. You’re not supposed to slide that far at just 30km/h after all. Driving according to the weather and roads as he better do he gets pretty far, and everything’s fairly merry and nice. Dark as hell, with snow coming at you, some pleasant music in the background, and things aren’t bad at all.

He comes at this long stretch of clear unangled part of road that is perfect for increasing the km/h’s a bit. Which isn’t, strictly speaking, a bad idea. The road there’s straight, broad, and as safe to speed up in as driving usually is, but he didn’t exaggerate, in his wisdom. The problem came when he shifted down one gear for the oncoming turn, putting some minor pressure on the break to slow down the speed so that he didn’t have to gamble with conditions and fans. That went well, it’s just that a few seconds later the poor bastard has to sneeze, most likely at 55km/h maybe a bit less, and an odd instinct comes to the fore, slowing down to avoid accidents, so he hits the break for a mere second or less.

It’s the little things that makes a lot of shit run headlong into fans, creating a badass amount of mess to clean up. In this case it was an old instinct coupled with shitty conditions, creating a pretty crappy situation. Fans tend to evenly distribute the fecal matter excellently.

In any case the car, to his horror, had started sliding just inside the turn. The thought was pretty simple, “Fuck”, and the reaction was to bend down and brace. Hitting the side of the road, which is filled with rocks the size of medicin-balls and bigger, shouldn’t be that bad considering the care he’d put into the speed not being too high, but as with strange physics that’s not much of an issue if you’ve got the right angle when hitting the fan. It still gets messy.

Hitting the side of the road was meant to be a simple thing. The hit would be a small “Whomp” and then a complete stop. The small “Whomp” turned out to be a “Whomp goes the car”, and the front-wheel to the right hit the rock pretty dead on, then went up in a “Whomp” that flipped the car. Another “Fuck” went through his head at this point, because that’s not how it was supposed to go, and stupid as he was he was a bit late at closing his eyes at this moment. A small piece of glass was retrieved later in the evening by the young man’s father. From the lower-right recess of the eye-socket.

The car landed nicely on it’s wheels again. The word “Fuck” crept out of his mouth, immediately followed by a “Wow”, and he looked around at the debris. His beloved car was pretty apparently totalled in several ways. He felt a pang of sadness for the car he’d known his whole life, right before he said “Faen”, and pulled out the cell-phone to call his domestic seniors for help in getting the smoking wreckage off the road.

As he gently exited the car he turned angry, at himself, for not doing one out of a “million” things he could have done to save the car, instead of turning it into the sad sight it was. He had to concede that done was done, but he’d know that for next time, one that would hopefully never come, and he muttered aloud that he was “Pretty fucking glad he hadn’t been driving like an idiot”. He continued to stare at the stuff that’d been pretty shitfanned for a few more moments while going through the mental math of how lucky he was, how not-dumb he’d been, and how stupid he felt for that one shitty instinct.

While looking at the tracks he’d made, he went through the effect of breaking where he had, effectively piling slick snow beneath his tire that created a forward momentum not easily stopped, for a small moment. Enough to not be able to turn properly to follow the road. He had instinctively tried to turn the wheel just a little bit at a time, trying to fool the car into getting back on track, not pulling at it like mad because that would only create a more efficient slide beneath the tire. A metre or so before the hit he’d twisted the wheel in dumb panic at his futile, and surprisingly calm, effort to fix the situation. He was surprised that he’d been calm, atleast before the final wrench of the tire, perhaps in frustration. A moment of pride filled him, and then he stared at the car again, and it was gone.

The rock it had hit managed to force the front-wheel backwards, hampering it’s forward momentum, and punting it upwards in an odd slingshot effect where the car’s left side spun to the side, while the right one was being forced upwards. The time spent on it’s back had been short, although falling back down on it’s wheels had taken some time. The road had been slick, perhaps even more so in that turn, and he counted himself lucky once again as he walked back to the car to put on his awesome mittens.

His father came in the tractor, an angry look and a stressed string of comments came as they made it ready to be towed home, which was expected and understood, a son had been in an accident. Parents never take that lightly, no matter how tough or stone cold they wish to act. Some fiddling with the car, turning it around with the tractor, and the wreckage was swiftly pulled home to be cleaned for things to keep.

As the young man writes a small post for his blog, in an unusual third-person perspective, probably as a means to deal with what happened, share the experience while it’s still fresh and unmuddied, he ponders when, or if, he’ll be able to sleep tonight at all. Alot of things happened, what he could have done instead bothers him. He was really fond of that car, and now it was out there, wrecked and ungraceful because of him. He’d been in an accident, and now he feels apathy.

A sneeze, a small second. All the little things. Still alive, happy to be around. Which is a big thing. Angry, it was a nice car, with lots of sentimental value. Feeling stupid, a bit proud, very happy, a bit sad. Seriously, a sneeze. It begs the question whether to feel stupid for such an odd occurrence, or better for not being another statistical idiot driving retardedly fast.

Thank you for reading.

Now, I’m not much for the whole “let’s talk about weather because there’s shit else to talk about”, but this one’s an exception. Why? Because it’s got a funny point/morale: The rest of the valley seems to have trouble sleeping through all this, while little me’s sleeping sound as a rock. I’m suspecting I like noise when I sleep. Atleast the expected kind of noise that repeats itself, and to an extent drowns out unexpected noises. Whichever. There’s alot of wind, and it’s making me sleep sound as a rock. Which I’ve said already. Surprise. I also found a way to make weather a bit more interesting.