Birds Against Silence
on the perils of raising oneself....badly
I drew this American goldfinch over the past few days. Mixed media on Bristol, roughly 9x12 — mostly Caran d’Ache Luminance colored pencil, with some Ohuhu alcohol markers and acrylic paint pens worked in.
I’m pleased with him. The yellow has the warm and cool shifts I wanted, the eye has life, the claws grip the branch the way claws actually do.
He’s for sale. I’ll get to the price.
But first I want to tell you about the perils of raising oneself. If one raises oneself, and one then stumbles into a platform — say, on Substack — and dozens of one’s readers point one in the direction of Dave Ramsey?
Well, one might follow his plan to the letter.
One would be an idiot.
Specifically, one would be the kind of idiot who hears “pay off debt aggressively using the snowball method” and absolutely sprints with it, cackling, without having the sense to ask oneself whether $1,000 — Baby Step One, the emergency fund Dave has been preaching since, as far as I can tell, the first Bush administration — is really an emergency fund in 2026, or whether it’s a number that hasn’t moved since gas was a dollar a gallon.
I really should have thought about that.
But I was too busy enjoying the feeling that a lot of people had pointed me to this wise man with a wise plan.
Sigh.
I have been, for several months, executing an aggressive debt payoff plan. The default trajectory had me debt-free around Thanksgiving 2027. I pulled it forward several months by throwing every spare dollar at the smallest balance, rolling payments forward as things got paid off, tracking my progress in “days ahead” of schedule.
It’s the kind of project I love: a clean optimization problem with a number that goes up. I was a Dave Ramsey gold star student. The thousand was sitting there. The snowball was rolling. Everything was working.
Which brings me to the goldfinch and the hearing aids.
My hearing aids are five years old. As of this morning, when I had a conversation with my audiologist’s office, I now know for sure that lithium-ion batteries last four to five years. Two months ago I could wear them sixteen hours; now I’m lucky to get ten.
I should have seen this coming the way you see a bill coming — predictably, with a calendar entry, with money set aside.
I didn’t, because I was busy making the days-ahead number go up.
The original pair was bought, generously, by Vermont Medicaid back when I qualified. That was a real gift and I’ve never stopped being aware of it. Private insurance, by contrast, will cover roughly 20% of a new pair if I’m lucky and 0% if I’m not — and “if I’m not” is the more common outcome.
This is because the American healthcare system has decided, at some point and apparently with a straight face, that hearing is optional. Eyes? Sort of optional; vision insurance is a separate thing you buy. Teeth? Definitely optional; dental is its own racket. Ears? Optional. The senses you use to perceive the world and do your job are treated as luxury add-ons to the actual body, like heated seats.
I don’t want socialized medicine. I’ve read enough to know I don’t want that system either. But the current arrangement is a mess everyone privately admits is a mess, and ‘do nothing forever’ is not actually healthcare policy.
I paid a genuinely upsetting amount in federal taxes last month.
It would be nice to keep hearing well enough to do the work that generates them.
You would think our healthcare system would be arranged to facilitate this.
You would be wrong.
I should be specific about what I need, because some of you are going to want to be helpful in a specific way and I want to head that off. I need the prescription kind, programmed to my specific audiogram. I have tested the OTC kind. I will buy a pair in a pinch and use them when these die if I have to.
But OTC hearing aids work on the principle of “make everything louder,” and what I need is the kind that work on the principle of “make up the specific frequencies you’ve lost.” I work mostly with men, whose voices live in the part of my hearing that’s gone, and I live alone, which means I don’t have anyone in the house to repeat things or catch the smoke alarm or tell me the dishwasher stopped.
I already miss a lot. I am not interested in missing more in exchange for a lower sticker price, unless that’s truly my only option.
So please do not lecture me about Costco or Jabra or your aunt who loves her Bose. I know. I have looked. I know what I need to function. Trust me on this one.
A new pair of the kind I need runs around $8,000. I have my thousand. I need the other seven.
So I’m pausing the aggressive snowball, redirecting that energy toward the gap, and selling the goldfinch.
Auction. Highest bidder in two days takes him home. Mixed media on Bristol, 9x12, signed. Email vtwriterartist at gmail (or reply to this email) to bid. Shipping in the US will run about $30 with insurance.
I genuinely love drawing birds. If anyone wants me to draw and auction off your favorite bird next, email me a species and I’ll see what I can do.
Some of you, kindly, will wonder if I’d accept a GoFundMe. I would not, and I want to be clear about why. GoFundMe is for people who are out of options — people facing homelessness, untreated illness, actual catastrophe. I am not in that category. I have a salary, a Substack, art commissions, and tutoring income.
What I have is a planning problem, not a crisis.
The people who would contribute to a GoFundMe of mine are kind people, and many of them have kids, and many of them are working harder than I am for less. I’m not doing it unless the alternative is living in my car, and I am nowhere near living in my car.
The goldfinch is one of my options. The next drawing is another. The drawing after that is another.
Bid on the bird. Suggest the next one. I’ll be at the drawing board, working on the gap. Both gaps, really — the one between Baby Step One and an $8,000 pair of hearing aids, and the older, quieter one I’ve been trying to fill by letting strangers on the internet hand me a wise dad with a radio show.
Turns out neither gap closes itself.
But one of them closes faster if I draw enough birds.