I want to write about John the Shoe Shine Boy but it will have to wait. It's a story I hope is worth telling; there were volumes screaming out from his steel-blue eyes. And then, right around the corner, was Colonel Sanders. Trapped in a time warp, these two and others took us in. But that will be told another day, perhaps in the 'morrow. For now, I’m in a bog. A blog bog.
Caught up in a rapturous lucky streak of my own making, I was going full bore with the Zir Effect until ‘THEY” came. They, those people from a past still part of me. The children, grandchildren, lovers, friends. The sundry others that can’t or won’t let go. Admittedly, it’s a two-way street; the door swings both ways. I’ve always had an open door policy when it comes to my past and an open door policy when it comes to my future. That allows me, for the most part, to stay present in the now. But I do slip up. Like you, I get dragged into my past like an unwilling, blindfolded prisoner, shored up against the wall of her own self-execution. Spinning 180, the future appears nothing more than an embryonic abstraction, though I often paint it bleak and foreboding or idealistically simplistic and quaint depending on my mood. I let others speak for me when I tire of explaining the inexplicable; a dishwasher packed to the gill tells me all I need to know about my existence. And yet I yearn for those things that will crack my porcelained view of the world and open me further.
I am angry with those who take advantage of others yet I allow myself to be taken advantage of. If I can see the thread of perpetual bondage can I snip it and put an end to the madness? Or does that very thread hold me together?
My eyes are fine, the doctor reported. Early cataracts. I knew my vision was partially obscured so why did I pay to have this knowledge substantiated? Other than that, nothing has changed. Why do they not see that my left eye is appreciably different from my right? It’s blurry, for God’s sake! Are their assessment tools so archaic that they can’t detect the obvious? Because of this anomaly, everyone sneaks up on me from the left, like apparitions encroaching on my sanity. By the time I see them, they’ve already made themselves at home. I don't mind, they're my family after all.
