a nod is as good as a wink

I have glaucoma that is advancing kind of fast -- and now cataracts in each eye -- so there are some unanticipated difficulties in day to day blog maintenance.  You may have noticed some odd things going on, font-wise, for instance!  Bizarre spacing strategies.  More than a few instances of original spellings!  After hours of messing around with formats and styles this morning, in a vain attempt to avoid doing anything of real consequence, I have hit on this font style as being easiest on the old eyeballs.  Even though a couple of people suggested color changes as well, probably because I've put together a pretty boring scheme, I am keeping a basic stark dark-on-white.  Still, the white background is a problem.  White and light are both my biggest visual challenges, really, and they only become more troublesome as the day progresses.  By the time I pack it in, usually in the wee hours, my vision fairly throbs from all the brightness.

I have built-in strobe!

For some reason, my ophthalmologist refuses to entertain any discussion of removing the cataracts.  You probably wouldn't believe me capable of tolerating obtuse and deflecting responses to my health questions, but you'd be surprised how fear can still the tongue.

The oft-mentioned MDVIP Go-To-Guy, a true Godsend, finally deciphered my frequent whine about the eye doctor, finally figured out how scary I find this ongoing loss of vision, and suggested a new specialist.

This change is not at all like yesterday's defection to a new cardiologist.  My former Heart Dude was and is simply outstanding;  It was his hospital affiliation that spooked me, not him.

Where does this guilt at changing doctors come from?  Why do I care what my ophthalmologist thinks of me, if he even does?  It's ridiculous, this ego-driven world view of mine.  We simply don't communicate well.

No, that's not true!

He ignores my complaints and will either talk over my questions or answer them with sarcasm that I just don't get.  Before every appointment, and Good Lord there have been enough of them, I would sternly tell Fred that "this time" I would not leave until I understood the "plan." About five years ago, the doctor made the only clear statement of intent that I can recall, saying that "[his] job is to preserve what vision [I] have."

Well, that battle has been lost!  I asked when he planned to remove the cataracts, and he answered with "Never, if I can help it."  That left me speechless but also finally motivated me to turn to Go-To-Guy.  In addition to refering me to a new dude, Go-To-Guy explained that glaucoma complicated the seemingly simple decision of how and when to remove a cloudy lens.

This is one area of my health concerns where I can be considered non-compliant and generally a rotten patient.  I had years to observe the stubbornness of my grandfather as he went completely blind from glaucoma.

One day, heh-heh, I should regale you with the stories of the Old Man firing a gun in the general vicinity of his brother-in-law, who had the unfortunate habit of belittling him.  People tended to allow his bullying, in large part because he was a wealthy old cuss, and without an heir.

I'm sure that, years later, when mean old James died, a lot of vague relations blamed their failure to inherit his millions on my blind gun-toting grandfather.

And it was something, too, to see him mow the lawn.  With a riding mower, without any discernible guide beyond his intimate knowledge of his own property.

He managed huge vegetable and flower gardens without apparent difficulty.  The only thing he clearly gave up was driving a car.

I am nowhere close to having his bravery or substance.

My failure to use the eyedrops designed to lower eye pressure is not a complicated behavior.  The whole issue scares me to death.  The drops may lower my pressures, but they also mess up my vision so much that I cannot function as a seeing adult -- can't read, can't write, can't watch television, play bridge, or make a discerning judgment based on the casting of one of Those Looks.  My eyes become red and irritated, the world shows up as a great big blur.  It's not even the kind of deficit where applying magnification has any effect whatsoever.  Granddad used to peer at the New York Times through binoculars.  That's not going to work for me.  I'd end up with magnified mess.

blah::blah::yadda::yadda

There is actually something else going on with these orbs but I cannot remember the term.  It has to do with the center part of my vision going to heck.  I take the stance of it-hardly-matters because I was told by Eye Guy that there was nothing to be done about it, sorry!  I was legally blind before being diagnosed with glaucoma and I guess that has given me a bit of fatalism over the whole business.

Predeterminism.

Defeatism.

blah::blah::yadda::yadda

If anyone out there has any expertise in layout/design with an aim toward ease on the eyes, particularly how to  handle disturbances that come from "halos" and distortions due to cataracts, please lay your opinion and advice upon me! Also, Eye Guy told me not to pay for new glasses, as my vision will be unstable for a good while... Is that right?  Am I just supposed to break out the Braille?

Jeez.

Mitigating Factors: Dame Marjorie Chardin, P-876954, and Nathan Hale

Do you remember Uncle Victor, Harold's one-armed relative, the sleeve of his dress uniform folded neatly and rigged to a mechanized salute? The one described as "General Bradley's right hand man"?

The one who said: The two best wars this country ever fought were against the Gerrys. I say get the Krauts on the other side of the fence where they belong. Let's get back to the kind of enemy worth killing, and the kind of war this whole country can support.

While I wasn't exposed to statements exactly like that, as a military brat, I did grow up tapping my toes to the tune of regret. Regret that the average soldier was more interested in the benefits promised after a few piddly years of service; Regret that black men were enlisting in disproportionate numbers; Regret that the military found itself more and more in the position of a finishing school for people that never really even had a start.

I am still confused about my father's view of war. He did not love it or hope for it, though he did wax poetically nostalgic about the unity war supposedly gifted to this country prior to, say, 1950.

Brilliant, in some ways, my father rationalized his involvement in the decision to kill other men and women. It was, thought he, inevitable that they should die. Therefore, he served proudly as their personal Mitigating Factor.

As Mitigating Factor, he transformed what might otherwise be seen as -- simply -- sanctioned murder, into the cleanest, quickest, most painless death possible.

He was a pilot, of course. Dropping bombs (and other things) -- not onto people but onto strategic targets. Eliminating those targets would advance some battle plan or other, and the smooth advancement of that plan would likely have a domino effect of smoothness on the overarching blueprint for the war.

Fewer of "our boys" would die. The "conflict" would be shortened, the enemy thereby benefitting as much as our own valiant selves. Collateral Damage, meet my Dad, the Mitigating Factor.

I think he was only at peace in the sky, flying high. He didn't become a Total Fart until they pulled him down from up there so as to better pick his brain for its brilliance in organization and logic.

His logic could, and did, drive people crazy. Foundational logic. As if it were so decreed by the Boy Scout Manual, he never did or said anything without the sturdy tripod of an unassailable foundation.

This liberated him from responsibility and guilt, and rendered him always right. He had a heart, and he loved deeply, but those emotional twinges couldn't compare with the imperative to be always right.

Someone who drops bombs on people cannot afford to entertain the notion of being wrong.

So it only followed -- oh, how tired I grew of everything following, everything proceeding logically -- So it only followed that when his 20 year old son, a tall, good-looking, and terribly smart piece of Collateral Damage, bared his soul to reveal that he did not have enough money for food, my Dad, his Mitigating Factor, replied, "You once told me to get out of your life, and I have."

In the world of a Bomb-Dropper, choices and options appear but once and you don’t have the luxury of “opting out” of your choice. It’s all or nothing, black or white. The bombed people are either dead or alive, never wounded, never forever barely there, pursuing promises in prosthetics the way a hormone-driven boy might pursue a twitching skirt.

At the age of 16, I marched into the living room one evening and opined that I would like to, possibly, maybe, if it wouldn’t upset World Harmony overly much, visit my Mother -- from whom I had been separated for roughly a dozen years. It took more courage than I actually had to stand in that precisely decorated room and make that particular request. I clearly had not considered how it might be transformed by Foundational Logic, or how I might be promptly and expeditiously molded into Collateral Damage by the very dominant Mitigating Factor.

“I will get your luggage down from the attic, you can pack all your things, and leave now,” he answered. Within minutes, he had the trap door and rickety stairs pulled down, and my soft-sided, blue-plaid luggage set came flying and bouncing down, tossed one right after the other: 3 suitcases of graduated sizes, an overnight bag, plus one hard-sided makeup case that I inherited from my step-mother.

I've never much enjoyed arguing either side of nature versus nurture. I see my father's same frightening intransigence in myself, and therefore understand my nagging need to place my absolutism clearly in the Realm of That Which is Good.

And Right. Good, and Right.

I am sure that you can probably find there where I fly above it all and drop bombs for the furtherance of conquest, as well. Excuse me for excusing myself from that much insight.

I haven't seen or spoken to the man since 1989. I look at pictures of his father in old age and figure that he must look roughly the same now. My aunt, his sister, exploded the myth of that grandfather as kindly some time ago. I wrote about it, here. For some reason, my reaction has settled into complacency. I am not gifted with logic, for my thinking goes something like this:

Granddaddy was not the kind and gentle man I [thought I] knew. He terrorized and beat his children. So it makes sense that he was an orphan. That he was an orphan explains everything.

Huh? Do you follow that? I don't and I am the one thinking it.

Dad did not just bomb the life out of people. He also did brave things like fly a huge, lumbering (indefensible) aircraft very low over enemy territory so as to rescue a group of injured compatriots. We called them "hospital planes." They were converted C-141s, not exactly lithe and agile aircraft.

He was practically the Patron Saint of Hospital Plane Jockeys, and there were large numbers of female flight nurses who adored him. They would hoot and holler at him when he rode around base. He ate it up.

There is a remarkable photo essay, I suppose it might be called, that the Denver Post recently published on the 35th anniversary of the fall of Saigon, April 30. It is called "Captured: A Look Back at the Vietnam War."

In the middle of all these words, I had to stop and look at something. I trust the visual, even knowing that it, too, can be manipulated. I needed to feel sweltering tropical heat again, that heaviness, that being-under-water feeling. Every afternoon at four, I would sit on the porch and watch the line of fierce rain travel across the rice paddies, the verdant hills. We lived right next to the Perimeter Fence. Negrito women who could not take care of their newborn babies threw them over that fence in the hope that an MP would find the tiny thing and take it to the hospital.

For some reason, an image formed in my mind of an MP with a wee enfant skewered on the end of a bayonet. That never happened, of course.

I find myself increasingly tired of people and their antics, even as a weird encompassing love for people is born in me. We are so foolish, so full of ourselves. So fundamentally fucked up.

Harold says to Maude: You sure have a way with people. She famously responds: Well, they're my species! -- and we all smile to ourselves, indulgent.

Of course, she waltzes through the film with a number (P-876954) tattooed on her forearm, as well. This is supposed to make the odd, beloved character an even greater life force, of course, careening toward suicide with unparalleled joie de vivre and Cat Stevens crooning "trouble..." in the background.

(A Curiosity: I have noted, over these many years of forcing my friends to watch Harold and Maude, that there are two, and only two, types of viewers in my acquaintance. There are those who come away chattering about daisies, and incessantly blathering about how they "feel that much of the world’s sorrow comes from people who are this [point to a daisy] yet allow themselves be treated as that [gesture to a field of daisies]." Then there are the people who realize that Maude's munificent world view was born of essential and terrible hardship, and maintained in spite of naked and recurring evil. It scares me sometimes that I, and people of my ilk, do not engage in any synthesis. One is either a daisy-pointing dolt or a sarcastic bit of Damaged Goods.)

I have dreamt about that film often enough. In my succinct dream style, the film just has a few scenes, pretty faithfully reproduced.

There is the moment where Maude announces, "I took the pills an hour ago. I'll be gone by midnight," and we see the horror of comprehension spread across Bud Cort's young face and hear his scream coalesce with an ambulance's siren.

Not quite superimposed, more like... overlapping, is the scene where Harold's modified hearse flies over the cliff.

But, annoying as a computer popup screen, is interspersed Uncle Victor, the stump of his right arm flying up into a salute, crying: "Just like Nathan Hale... That's what this country needs -- more Nathan Hales."