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Hear today, gone tomorrow
By Hayley Kaufman, Globe Staff, 7/15/2001

This is how it'll happen.
Let's say it's 10, maybe 15 years from now. You're 40, though you've taken
to being vague when people ask how old you are.
Anyway, you and a couple of friends will be sitting in a coffee shop or some
kind of chain eatery. Nothing fancy. Krispy Kreme Doughnuts and Grill.
(After a decade of explosive growth, they're not just doughnuts anymore.)
Starbucks and More. It doesn't matter where, really. You're just hanging
out.
You get to that point in the conversation where you all start talking about
your bodies, because since we were little kids, in the '70s, we've always
talked about our bodies. Biceps, thighs, breasts, they're our generation's
lingua franca, like farm talk was for our great-grandparents. Personal, but
not too personal. Like chatting via e-mail.
You prattle on about an old skateboarding injury, the knee that aches when
it rains. The battles with weight. The psychological benefits of preventive
plastic surgery.
Finally, between your second iced tea and a Cobb salad with low-fat Ranch,
you get down to business.
You pull them out and start comparing size.
Shape.
Features.
Get your mind out of the gutter. I'm talking about your hearing aids.
Of course I'll repeat that. Hearing aids. The soon-to-be-ubiquitous
accessory. A millennial growth industry if ever there was one. I can see the
new ad campaign now: ''Hearing Aids - BECAUSE YOU'RE DEAF, DUDE!''
Sure, sure. The great glut of Boomers, now slouching toward midlife, will
soon have the market cornered on every ailment, large and small. High
cholesterol. Lousy joints. Incontinence.
No longer will, say, liver spots be a regular part of growing old. The
oversize freckles will be an epidemic that must be stopped. Platoons of
scientists will slave to obliterate the cosmetic scourge from the face of
the earth. As the Boomers will constantly remind the rest of us, no
generation in history has suffered as they suffer.
In the meantime, we Gen-Xers and Gen-Yers will suffer in silence.
But not complete silence. We'll have our hearing aids.
It's not as if our elders aren't losing their hearing. They are. Decades of
amplified rock 'n' roll, the sound of gunfire in Vietnam, and an
increasingly noisy modern world have chipped away at their hearing,
specifically at the hair cells of the inner ear that are damaged by exposure
to high-decibel noise.
We'll soon be awash in hearing-aid ads, infomercials, and herbal remedies
that promise to assuage their pain.
But let's talk about the group that's really going deaf. Those of us under
the age of 35. The ones who saw the introduction of the Walkman (1979), the
rise of the spongy in-ear headphone, the endless succession of bigger,
louder, more realistic video games, and the 1,000-watt in-car subwoofer.
Not to mention our endless pursuit of great live-music venues, great bands,
and great dance clubs.
''Yeah, I am completely going deaf, and I'm only 30,'' admits BJ Ray, a
musician who books and promotes at the Milky Way. ''I have no doubt it's
pandemic at this point. We all learned about Pete Townshend too late.''
It was Townshend, the Who's celebrated guitarist, who helped make tinnitus
(a constant, high-pitched ringing or roaring in the ear brought on by noise
exposure) a household word in the '80s. Years of assaulting his ears with
electric riffs left Townshend with permanent and profound hearing loss.
But even after we learned that Mom was right - that we really would go deaf
if we didn't ''turn down that noise'' - few of us did anything about it. We
want our Surround Sound, our eight-speaker stereo systems. We still want our
MTV.
Some nightclubs have even taken to selling cheap earplugs, which is probably
the most accessible kind of ear protection. But the foam nuggets poke out of
only a smattering of ears.
''I can't say that I wear earplugs every time I'm in a club,'' says Arto
Payaslian, local musician and clubgoer. ''It's something you have to think
about, and I think a lot of people don't.''
It's hard to say how widespread hearing loss is among young (and young-ish)
adults. Most studies focus on the elderly or the very young. But one
oft-repeated National Health Interview Survey estimates that hearing loss
among 18- to 44-year-olds increased by 17 percent between 1971 and 1990.
Meanwhile, a study published in this month's Pediatrics indicates that 12.5
percent - or 5.2 million - kids between the ages of 6 and 19 already have
hearing problems.
And since we all seem content to pump up the volume, expect more hearing
loss where that came from.
Which leads us to that coffee shop 10 or 15 years in the future. By then, I
predict that hearing aids - tiny, nearly invisible, perhaps as disposable as
contact lenses - could be as ubiquitous as cellphones are now. Any stigma
once associated with them, gone.
''I'm totally for spare parts,'' says local musician Kristian Montgomery,
28. But if we're really lucky, he says, when we blow out an organ a decade
from now, we'll just order up a new one.
''They'll just replace whatever part you need,'' he says. ''Smoke too much
tobacco, drink too much booze, get a replacement part. There will be
absolutely no accountability for one's behavior.''
Sounds intriguing to me. If I heard him right.
© Copyright 2001 Globe Newspaper Company.

        -Brian in Atlanta
         The Who This Month!
        http://members.home.net/cadyb/who.htm