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When I started getting some help with my eyes I thought replacing the cataracts with intraocular lenses would take care of my sight problems, and it has to a large degree, but my right eye has some astigmatism and that's making me question how satisfactorily this deal will work out. I don't have a clue whether my current problems with my right eye will work themselves out over time.
I almost got a traffic ticket yesterday for not wearing eyeglasses. It's marked on my driver's license that I am supposed to be wearing them all the time when I'm driving, but with my old prescription I can no longer see very well.
The cop didn't care whether I could see better without them, only that my license said I was supposed to have them on, and he had to write me a ticket no matter what. He said I'd have to take whether I needed them up or not with the judge. No blame. He was just doing his job, which obviously doesn't require judgment on his part.
The only way I can get this legal restraint off my driver's license is to go and re-take the visual test at the DMV, but the problem with my right eye makes me hesitate to do that right now. I'm sort of waiting until after my next post-op appointment to see what's up first. In any case, I gotta study the road sign shapes again.
I like to be super-prepared when I do these bureaucratically controlled chores. The less the bureaucrats get taken out of their routine the friendlier they seem to be toward me, and the more unconsciously beneficial to me they become. I seem to have a knack for dealing with people who do Capricorn-like work, and it's helped me survive more than once.
Fortunately, I studied oracles for most of my early and middle years. Mostly vegetable oracles with the four seasons used as the indicators of the wheel of life. Oracles were/are used to measure and mark time. Like ropes with knots tied into them are/were used to judge the depth of water on ships and boat to avoid reefs or to find the holes where the fish hang out.
The best words for choosing a wise course of action I've found recently are contained in the lyrics of a pop song called The Gambler, made popular by the country singer Kenny Rogers. I don't know who wrote the song or the lyrics. I like it. I always stop and listen if it's in the air. I've never met anybody who didn't like the song. It rings true for life as we know it to a lotta people.
It's a fun song to sing when I'm alone. Especially if I'm driving to some place that is a fair distance away. It seems to cause me to think about real situations I've found myself, in the past, at the same time I'm singing the lyrics of The Gambler.
What seems to tickle me to do this while I'm driving my car is how I nostalgically realize that I unconsciously reached for the utilitarian ideas within the lyrics of The Gambler that apply to this remembered scenario, and because of it, I'd see myself successfully coping with wot's what with no undue haste.
It's very frustrating to experience this after-the-fact ecstasy despite the joy it provides. Sure, I'll take being immersed or enveloped inside a fine state of euphoria any ol' time. There has hardly ever been a revered state I wouldn't instantly abandon in order to participate in some joyous reverie for as long as I could milk it. Glutton?
What endlessly plagues me, however, is that I don't experience ecstasy in real time by having reached for and employed wisdom as a deliberate tactic. Why can't I become ecstatic in the same moment it arrives, but have to wait until it appears as afterthought?
Maybe immediate happiness is such a distraction that expressing it during the event itself could break the spell. It's not a matter of ethics or morals, but practicality. For ecstasy to erupt into being as if spontaneous, sometime it has to be held in until it's all over but the shouting. That may be why I am always the last to know?
Most of the holy books of graven images I've encountered appear to inform their devotees of what they gotta know in order to cope with traditional problems of their culture in the wisest way possible when one encounters them along life's way. Many of those holy books were written a long time ago in ancient languages that have been interpreted in thousands of ways using thousands of modern languages that now have a thousand words to explain each original word.
I'm still astounded by the claim of white-haired pundit I once admired who claimed that the language of the ancient Babylonians had fewer than fifteen hundred terms or expressions with which to build the Tower of Babel, and it had to be dully represented, for they only had five words for colors.
All these holy books from all those different cultures say about the same thing that's written in the English lyrics of The Gambler. "You gotta know when to hold 'em. Ya gotta know when to fold 'em. You gotta know when to walk away, and you gotta know when to run." Candidly, what else does a thoughtful human being need to know?
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