My workload's been crazy and I'm way behind on daily tasks such as answering e-mail, returning phone calls and drinking myself to oblivion.

For the past couple of months, I've been producing a CD for San Francisco comedian Mary Carouba and using my computer to do the final mix. That means I'm off the Internet most of the day, and when I finally do connect I'm looking at 72 new e-mails a day. At least.

Last night, I opened one of my e-mails to read, "Your column sucks the last few weeks." That does it. What I need is some kind of automated e-mail device that scans for the words "column, sucks" and sends back an e-mail that reads "fuck off, die."

Where was I? Right. Mary Carouba's CD.

I love making records, but unfortunately I wasn't involved in the front end of this production, so the audio sounds funky on some tracks (yes, I assume the sound quality would be much better if I had recorded it myself). But you do what you have to do and you try to stay within budget.

Here's how it works: Carouba hires someone to record a video of her shows, then she sends me the tapes. I take the best tracks from each tape -- based on performance first, sound quality second -- and clean up the noise, which can range from a slight hiss to severe hums to girlish squeals... and where in the fuck is that swishing noise coming from?

One of Carouba's best routines suffers from something akin to a dentist's drill in the background of the recording, and I have to try seven different tricks to clean up the audio and still retain some semblance of fidelity to her voice.

Fortunately, she delivers a superior performance, so it's well worth the effort it takes to mask the noise. The track's tentatively called, "My Hallucination." Check it out for yourself:

I'm so glad I got clean and sober before that show came on the air, "America's Dumbest Criminals." I'm very grateful for that, because I would have been on that show. Why? Because I was an utter... idiot.

 

Right before I got into recovery, I was staying with a friend of mine in this lovely neighborhood. I shouldn't have been anywhere near this neighborhood, quite frankly. They were sleeping at four in the morning and I was out on their porch -- can you guess what I was doing at four in the morning? That's right, getting loaded.

 

I had this weird feeling and I turned around and saw this very strange-looking man come out from behind a tree and lunge at me. I ran into the house, I woke everybody up, we called the police and they actually brought a police artist out and he drew a sketch of the guy I saw behind the tree.

 

The whole neighborhood was in an uproar, and people were getting burglar alarms setup all because they passed out an artist's sketch to about 150 people of my hallucination.

 

There was no guy behind a tree. I was losing... my mind.

(Copyright 2000 by Mary Carouba)

The best I can do with the above track is make it sound like an old radio broadcast. But it works. Maybe.

So far, the biggest problem I've had to face on this project is a constant ringing noise on the left side of the audio. Each track from every tape contains this high-pitched, almost dog-whistle ring to it and no matter what I do, I can't get rid of it. It drives me crazy and yet I don't hear it coming from the right speaker at all. I suspect it might be some kind of flaw in my equipment or a glitch that occurred during the transfer from videotape to the Macintosh.

A few nights ago, just out of curiosity, I covered my left ear and listened to the tracks. The ringing noise disappeared.

I suppose most people would have come to the opposite conclusion, but my first thought was, "Oh, no. There's something wrong with my right ear."

Seeking sober verification, I brought my girlfriend Karin into the studio and asked her to listen. "Do you hear that high ringing noise coming out of the left speaker?" She said she didn't hear a damn thing. I decided I needed to find someone younger with fresh ears to listen to the noise. A few days later, Karin's 26-year-old nephew Shawn came to visit, and I asked him to pay close attention to the recordings. He couldn't hear the high ringing noise either. I asked my buddy Mike, a 30-year-old, to come listen to the tracks, but he also didn't hear anything out of the ordinary.

Apparently, I suffer from a high ringing noise in my left ear. But my workload's been cut tremendously.

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STANDARD DISCLAIMER: This column aims to be funny. If you can read anything else into it, you're on your own. Copyright 2000 by Mike Jasper.