Lyricists and Ear Infections

I like to imagine lyrics for songs.

It’s a shame I’m tone deaf, what with having all these wonderful words floating in my head, but no music to set them to.  I think it all stems back to that flu I had when I was eight years old.
Or was I nine?
Until then, I possessed what could be called ‘perfect pitch’.  Loosely termed, of course, but perfect nonetheless: call out nearly any note and I could hum it to within a semitone or two, but thanks to a nagging ear infection, all of that musical ability somehow floated out the window. 

It was almost as disappointing as that time I lost all my math skills to a nasty sinus infection, and not to mention painful.  I’m telling you, it felt as though a rather large person had kicked a hole through my tympanum using a pair of steel-toed boots.

Tympanum is Latin for ‘ear drum’, by the way.  I don’t usually use Latin in my every day doings, but this is a public diary and what better way to come across as learned than to toss about body parts using a dead language or two.  (One has to be careful how one pronounces ‘learned’, for if it comes out in only one syllable, one could wind up looking the exact opposite.)

A terrible earache, it was.  Had me walking into walls, it did.  But that was years ago and not something on which I like to dwell.  So let’s get back to what I was really thinking when I began writing this silly entry:  I write words for songs that don’t exist.
Or maybe they do and I am just not able to recognize them. 

So what would that make me?  A lyricist?  I’m not sure I like that: it sounds too wimpy.  Like ‘florist’ or ‘sadist’.  It’s the ‘ist’ that does it, makes the stupid word sound French.  So what else could I be?  Besides a ‘lyricist’, I mean.  ‘Poet’ maybe?  No, I’m too silly for that.

How about just waiting?