Cold Hands, Cold Heart

It's chilly out. The low last night is the high today. I've had to put on some clothes to feel comfortable. I've lost or misplaced my grey toboggan hat. I like it because it's not made of wool, but that warm fuzzy stuff. I'll probably never see it again. That's the way it is with me and hats. Here today and gone tomorrow.

I stopped by Rainey's house for a little while on the way home yesterday. He was taking a nap when I got there. He welcomed me, as you might expect from someone with so much social and cultural training, but I wasn't really welcome. Another problem was that the events I'd dealt with just previous had made me a little tired also. It doesn't seem like sitting around waiting to get my eyes examined and waiting to get my glasses made would be a tiresome thing, but it was. Rainey and I sat around trying to be polite when we didn't have our heart in it, and finally I came on home.

The whole time i was gone yesterday I wanted to be home. I had a really good reason for being out and about. I needed a new pair of glasses, but more than that I needed to know the condition the cataracts in my eyes were. I needed to know the parameters my insurance company uses to pay their part on a lens replacement operation, and whether whether the condition of my eyes warranted them paying. I kept hearing whispers, but nobody would tell me direct.

I was right and wrong all along. I worked myself into thinking about how nice it would be not to have to wear glasses anymore, and let myself be encouraged to think that if I played my cards right, then i wouldn't have to pay much to get it done. I proceeded on that assumption, and the surgeon went right along with me. No blame. It's the way he makes a living.

The potential problem that never really came about because of my caution was that I would have gotten the lens replacement operation that would have healed my cataract problem in that eye, but my insurance company wouldn't have paid,, and I would have to pay for the whole deal out of pocket. That would break me financially, and I'd still have only one eye fixed.

The whole eye deal has been much ado about nothing. I'm wearing new glasses that really improve my vision. I can close either eye and still see about the same thing in front of me. The frames are a lot lighter and they sit on my nose without pinching it so much.

The reason I wanted to be home yesterday is that everything I see out in the world anymore is the way it is because of my making it that way in my mind's eye. All the people. The entire countryside. All the stores and animals and stoplights... they're all the way they are because of the way I decide. At least to me they are. Whether they have individual careactoristics on their own without my input, who knows?

It kind of bothers me that the world depends on how I see it for it to be what it is to me. It really pisses me off sometime to think that for my world to change I gotta go to all that trouble of changing my mind so it can be so. That, plus the fact that it could and would be anything else besides what it currently appears to be just by a small shift in consciousness. Why bother?

I've been cutting my own hair for a few years now. It's easy enough. I bought a cheap pair of shears that have a quarter inch plastic spacer and I give myself a buzz cut, then take the spacer off and trim a little closer around my ears and the back of my neck. I just haven't done that lately. I got that seedy look going. I didn't change clothes or take a shower to get new glasses yesterday. I didn't brush my teeth. Nobody cared.

I was just another old man acting like many old men act. I'm not a prepossessing sight. People in general are more polite to older people. They let a lotta things pass. It's not like they're gonna get nakid with them and make wild, passionate love. They don't have to be on their P's & Q's any more than the old people, and so things can be much more relaxed and pleasant.

Sometimes it's not though. Realizing that I'm not sexually attractive to people who are still sexually attractive to me is not an easy burden to bear. Not for anybody probably. Sometime i have to deal with a deep anger that I have to change with the changes that go on with me. I don't always know it's there on the back burner waiting to boil over.

Most of the time i was actually young and sexually alluring to impregnable women I didn't even know it. Either that or thought it would last forever. By the time i began to understand that just my being young and sexually attractive was all it took to make that happen. I thought i had to do something to make myself stand out to attract the ladies. The whole time I was fooling myself, they knew it was them that made me stand out. I didn't.

By the time i figured it out I wasn't so young and sexually alluring, and something else actually did have to be done to turn heads. Then, by the time I got around to doing what I needed to do that hadn't needed doing just previous, I got old and didn't give a shit about being young or sexually alluring, even by hook or by crook.

I can practically guarantee anybody that with the onset of this arthritis I'm not concerned about looking or being sexually attractive. Even now while I'm taking steroids my thumb on my left hand is getting stiff and cramping. I have to force it straight so that it won't hurt as bad. I hope I learn to turn this pain into pleasure sooner than later.