right eye de-cateracted four days ago. now i wouldn't recognize myself if i met me on the street. very strange. i guess i will have to settle for looking like the bust of an old roman, warts and all. i'm not sure soft-focus not better. twenty-year-old eyes in a seventy-five year-old body? why couldn't it have been the other way around?
in the process i experienced a couple feelings i forgot i possessed. ready to drive to advanced surgery, i suddenly felt excited like a child. where did that come from? nothing like it for years and years. and i can't really blame it on the drugs. and i won't go into sexual anecdotes, ie. as george burns said, "making love at ninety is like using a rope."
that childlike wonder passed quickly enough. how many of the wise-guys have said: ENTHUSIASM IS ALL? and that's what the anticipation felt like. true, afterwards that eye didn't clear fast like the left. i kept waking up at my friends' place and lifting the plastic cover meant to stop me from rubbing my eye in sleep. still blurry. another childish emotion perhaps: i wanted to be at home in my own bed.
this cottage does have a womb-like feeling, especially with stuff piled everywhere. i do like it. i can't fall, i think, everything so close at hand. what about the young traveler i used to be? i have no idea how i romped about the world, sleeping in a luggage rack on a turkish train, sharing a bed in a belgrade household, riding a bus across canada lying on the back seat, or tolerating everybody throwing up on a ferry from england to ireland.
this week i have envisioned driving to santa fe, new mexico for a visit to the georgia o'keefe museum. sometimes you have to see the paintings, though almost every body's look better back lit on my tablet. and now those images pop out to me in 3d. have I mentioned another downside to losing my soft focus vision: grime?
yes, i will either have to do a thorough cleaning, or give up being embarrassed if a friend has to come clean up after my demise. don't ask me how i'll know about it. i know about it now. true, i have had other revelations this week. i don't know how i ever thought i'd get anywhere writing poetry, even if it's the most favorite thing i've done. theater was supposed to make me rich and famous. alas,unlike henry james and robert firbank who failed despite repeated attempts on the boards, i don't have prose masterpieces to fall back on.
once, three different psychics told me i'm here to play in this lifetime, having had so much authority and responsibility in past lives. if only i could get as invigorated as a kid waiting for santa claus, a few more electric shocks from the child i once was. a play reviewer said my performance in beckett's krapp's last tape, like a 'tortoise in quicksand.' never quite got over that feeling.
