No Brighter Future This Year

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What a lousy day I had yesterday. I went to the VA Hospital expecting the surgeon to look at my eyes and schedule me for surgery, and he shined me on by refusing to operate to please his boss. Told me to come back in six months. He didn't have any choice. He was working under the direction of this cruel old man who told him not to help me. Once these people get into the VA system they stay there forever. A male version of Nurse Cratchett.

I got the same situation going at the Durham VA. Nobody cares what anybody does or don't do. They're just going through the motions to get that government check. The doctors order bloodwork done to check on how these powerful drugs are affecting me, but the nurses don't do it, and they doctors don't care if they do or not.

At least they pay my travel expenses. Or will eventually. I had to wait in a long line to get the money yesterday. It was a little unusual, but not very. The veterans in line are ninety percent black even when they're only 20% of the population. White people get discriminated against because they oughta be able to afford better care. I accepted that I'm a pretty sorry white guy a long time ago.

My brother has been coming over in the evenings after dark and asking me if I wanna go walking with him. He needs the exercise because of his heart condition, and so I'm going with him simply because he ask me to. Last night we walked about a mile in the woods with his dogs tagging along.

I don't know what phase the Moon is in, but it didn't shine last night. We had to find our way by starlight. Both of us had little LED flashlights we could use if we became uncertain, but only used them to get around a gate area that was located next to a ditch. Next thing I know we'll probably go walking in the swamp at night. Our father used to do it regularly in the winter.

The weathermen said it was going get cold and stay cold. They're right so far. The tomatoes I didn't put in the greenhouse because the pot was too big for me to move alone looked pretty dead yesterday. It was even colder last night, so I'm pretty sure it's all over but the shouting. The tomatoes I put in the green house seem to be doing quite well.

I did remember to go to Barnes and Nobles to buy me a new puzzle book. In fact I bought two of them because they were the only ones they had from the LA Times editors I like a lot. They use some of the trickiest clues of any puzzles I've done yet. The NYTimes replaced their old puzzle editor, and I hate Will Shortz' trivial puzzles. They're more like a TV game show for the great unwashed than an intellectual exercise.

It's difficult for me to determine whether I've wasted my life on purpose, as I sometime claim, or whether there was nothing I could do about the way things went. Probably a little bit of both. I've explored the depths of despair, and thrown away whatever pride I might have inherited genetically.

I feel like I must be close to death or someone near to me is close to death. My heart is hurting, but I don't if it's not my brother's heart that is causing these motions. When he had heart palpitations and ended up getting a pacemaker put in, me and our other siblings independently went of our own accord to have our own hearts checked out.

This has happened twice in the last couple of days right after I finished eating. I don't have a clue what eating has to do with my heart hurting. I do know that my appointment with the eye surgeon left me very disappointed. The ophthalmology profession has really fucked me around over the last five years about the cataracts they see in there.

That's my general assessment of the medical profession in general these days. Their true credo appears to be "Your money or your life." It seems so tragic to discover in my dotage that the people I was led to trust with my life have their own agenda that has nothing to do with my well-being. The problem for me is that I can't really claim to be any better or worse than the people I accuse of being like me.

Yoga came into my life when I was a teen-ager through reading, and then when I went off on my own into the world I recognized opportunities to learn how to do yoga during my travels. Even today the local people think any practice outside of the interpreted auspices of the King James Version of the Bible is heresy.

If I'd stayed around in this part of the world and tried to fit in I would never have been able to adopt a hatha yoga practice because I would have been laughed at and taken for a fool. Just the way I am is now. I hurt my back in a auto accident and have never been able to return to my previous yoga habits.

About the closest I come to that is my singing the vowels. I sing the vowels as a chant or mantra or perhaps like a nursery rhyme that reaches deep into my experience as a newborn. I didn't occupy this specific body during its matriculation of being born and made wireless by snipping it's umbilical cord. I suspect this body wants it's old creator back. It may be self-destructing just to show my me who is boss. No blah-me-n.

My entire house along with me in it is being vibrated by an Army helicopter hovering about the runway at the airport. They began flying over here to this local airport which was built with Federal FAA money to use it to play war games.

The only positive feelings I get out of this was that the fat cats over to the country club thought they were really getting over when they lured the feds into paying for the runway extensions so they could come and go in their Lear jets.

Now when the Army comes and hovers over the runway for hours 3-4 days a week, there is nothing the fat cats can do to stop them from using the local airport any way they like. Many of them live closer to the runway than I do.

Other than the Army demonstrating that they are the largest and most powerful organization in the universe by using noise to demonstrate their superiority, the local pilats with their small airplanes and medium-sized passenger planes are not so distracting with the noise they make.

When they warm up the engines and eventually take off to go somewhere there is a brief wrinkle in the force and that's it. But, the Army helicopters hover above the runway about five or six feet in the air for as much as ten hours a day. At least they don't do it at night.

Sometime I wonder if I'm personally responsible for the Army making decisions that bring their noise over to my house. I'm perfectly aware that I'd have to be batshit crazy to cop to that. What I'm really wondering is whether it would do any good for me to move to a quieter place?

If I did have the power to make decisions about where the Army helicopters played war games I'm fairly sure I would change that decision and make it more pleasant for myself where I am now. I suspect that if my brother has a heart attack and dies, I'll die due to sympathy. Why would I not?

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