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The appointment I kept this morning at the VA Hospital was for checking my eyes to see if the hydroxychloroquine medicine I've been taking for about a year now is messing with my eyes. The doctor checked and saw no damage. That was a big relief. I've been told about the possibility of that as a side effect, and of course I started going blind immediately.
The good news is that he checked my cataracts and as soon as he looked into my right eye he said, "That's gotta come outta there." Then, he checked my left eye and said, "That one is ripe enough too. Let's take both cataracts out." I restrained my excitement enough to say, "Great, will you do that?" He said, "it's up to you. Do you wanna?"
"Absolutely! As soon as possible." So, he set up an appointment to see the eye surgeon on December 6th. I'm thrilled beyond words. Well, obviously not, but I'm very excited about achieving the goal I set three years ago.
Earth and water can fit together like this poem a Scorpio lady friend of mine wrote:
If you were dust
by the side of the road
in warm and sultry weather,
I'd become a cloud,
and rain on you,
and we'd be mud together.
~ Anita of Manassas
Anita's boyfriend was a good traveling buddy of mine. He was a Pisces. He always looked for the exits first thing when he entered an edifico he knew not well. If I just turned my head for a second or have it turned by angry eyes or a bar fight, and when I'd look around that boy be a gone Johnson.
I admired him. We could finish each other's sentences. He knew very well when it got too hot in the kitchen for him much better than me. I tried to leave on his word, but I couldn't rely on it. If trouble started and we weren't standing next to each other, he would use one of the aforementioned "exits", and I was on my own. We traveled together for two or three months working shrimp boats on the Gulf of Mexico from Cameron, Louisiana down to Brownsville, Texas.
I never thought about the infamous drug dens across the border from Brownsville in Matamoros. I never went to them because I only used psychedelics as a religious sacrament infrequently, and pot for recreation. My initial drug of choice was booze. I never smoked pot until I was twenty-seven years old. I smoke pot to push back the temptation of hard likker.
Beer hasn't really been my favorite form of booze. It's too easy for me to segue right into the hard stuff and I don't really like remembering how I acted the next morning when that happened. Red wine works for me as a go to in place of whiskey or vodka. I buy cheap Carlo Rossi Burgundy by the gallon. I'm a drunk, not a connoisseur. I got no couth. Just bad habits.
Like a fool, I thought my Pisces friend was basically a pothead and drunk like me. I couldn't have been more wrong. We got separated down in Brownsville. He had a stroke of luck one night at a bar when he met some shrimper guys and got himself hired on a steel-hulled shrimp boat. It was a large boat with all the conveniences of home.
The captain could stock up with enough fuel and supplies to stay out for weeks or even months without having to return to port to restock and refuel. When they did get back they usually had a big check to blow it out in style in Boys Town across the Rio Grande in Matamoros.
I found out too late that my friend's new crew mates didn't exactly do that. The whole crew except for the Captain were junkies. My friend was until then a dilettante, but he fell right in with their routine. They used the big checks to buy more hero wine for the next fishing trip out, and stayed so zonked out they could care less about the pastel pink bordellos of another world.
I never saw my traveling friend but once a couple of years later. I was happy to know he had survived, but he had called me to help him because he was still using and wanted me to help him get off it. I was a bum. I couldn't pay for his rehab. He knew that. I guess he just wanted to say good bye in his own way.
I honestly wouldn't have taken that ol' Ace down to Brownsville if I'd have known he had already developed a irresistible taste for slow boats to China. I knew he dabbled. We all dabbled, and challenged each to have fun. Some took such a liking they never stopped. It could have easily been me, and I ain't dead yet.
I only studied astrology after all this happened, and without it I couldn't have figured it. I never took that many people with me when I went a'viking. We understood each other very intuitively, until it came to how he reacted to an offer of a taste of the dreamtime.
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I do not attempt to tell the God's own truth here because I don't know what the truth is or hardly ever. I try to capture the drifting thoughts that randomly appear in my imagination for reasons I may not understand. I don't know if the content I capture with these words is true or false. The Comments settings are turned off to prevent me from having to defend what amounts to little more than fanciful, sometime crude speculation. Great moments in our lives never return.
