Blind or insane, If I had a choice I'd take insane—without hesitation.
On Monday July 12 I had an appointment with an eye glass doctor. I can't remember how to spell her title. Most importantly, she was a strong 7, with big round eyes and highly intelligent.
I gave her the three paragraph long concerns that I had memorized from my Darling Editor, for I cannot print legibly and have no printer.
The Doctor was very interested in my neurological diagnosis of “cluster head ache.” She then traced the nerve path and explained that my recent numbness in the nose and jaw was explained by the fact that this nerve does not just go over the temple to the eye, but has two lower branches along cheek and jaw.
Once I explained that I had over 20 concussions she twitched her nose like Elizabeth Montgomery in the 1960s TV show Bewitched, and got to work, doing 9 different examinations, including gloucoma, retina nerve test, and the specific concern of “convergence insufficiency” which is something that afflicts people who have had many concussions.
This took 45 minutes, the longest such exam I have had.
She declared with some surprise that the retina and muscles were normal for my age and that there was no convergence insufficiency, but there is a “convergence problem.”
“You do an enormous amount of close work and rarely use your bifocals for distance. So you are left peeking through the small lower lens for close work and, that lens is calibrated for 30% more distance than you actually work. You have the wrong glasses. You need screen glasses for close work. You can keep the bifocals for distance, as that part of your perscription has not changed. Speaking, light sensitivity, impact and eye strain are not causing eye pain, but are triggering the nerve above your eye that is already aggravated. That said, once you have your screen glasses, I wouldn't recommend another 37-book year.”
Below is my perscription, for those who understand this:
Distance
Right
SPH. +1.50
CYL. -1.00
Axis 090
Prism 2A
Base BO
Left
SPH. +1.50
CYL. -1.25
Axis 073
Prism 2A
Base BO
Near only
To the nerve that sprouts from the base of my brain and seems to be the cause of what I have been identifying as eye pain and as cozy numbness along the pathway on the right half of my skull. The numbness becomes pinching sometimes—like now, as I write this Saturday morning. It is advancing by year and ebbing and flowing with the seasons.
I regard science as fake, so will precede according to that view as I try to better understand this condition so I can work around it. So many folks I know have been inducted into the cult of science with its ultimate specific causes. I have badly broken veins on the inside of my right calf muscle, which have been there since 2000, when I fought 148 stick bouts with five foot long hardwood sticks.
When my friend Rick, the diet guy sees them, he says, “That's from not enough vitamin C.”
Then why has it only happened where I have been hit with sticks, with no veins broken on the left leg.
My mother sees those broken veins and says, “That is hereditary. Your sister has just started getting them [at age 50]. You need surgery to fix that.”
Mom also wanted me to pursue surgical options for the dimly understood problem with the base of my brain inflaming this three-branched nerve. In the world of science, pain is regarded as an affliction that must be externally addressed. In my demon-haunted world pain is a whining sissy that needs be strangled in the dark, or at least hushed into a bearable sob.
Again, science might say that we are bio-bots that follow our predetermined fate until surgical intervention. But I'm betting on my eye witness to the destruction of these veins by power strokes from wax wood staffs and swords.
The triggers are well known to me. But the ultimate trigger of the cycle I have been in since I crossed the Mississippi into the east in March, remains elusive.
I have noted that I have not had a bad cycle while at high elevation and that my worst cycles have been in the Mid-Atlantic lowlands and in Portland Oregon.
However, as I review these cyclic conditions, noting that building storm clouds are an immediate trigger as is a lingering low hanging cloud cover, it occurs, that I am only at high elevation at end of summer and early autumn, and that mid-summer, as now, has generally provided an easing of the pain. I recall years where I lived all year round in Baltimore, and had almost no pain in late summer and early autumn. This condition was diagnosed in early spring of 2005.
Might this be a seasonal affliction, divorced from elevation and simply coincident with my position on this planet?
I have not looked at the specifics of my writing either.
Might the subject I write upon anger a certain god and he sends his demon to torment me?
Are you laughing, Hamslice?
Then there are my sins. The women I have been involved with, include a few who claimed extraordinary powers, including my former owner who knew when Gabe had been in a knife fight from a dream before he told us. Maybe one of these bitches has seasonal depression and when her brooding hate boils over her sympathetic demon carries her ire into my brain stem?
Whatever the cause, my favorite being that Woden wants his eye back, I'm going to turn my back on Science as a young and fickle god and look to the demon haunted world of Reality and act according to my divinations and the occasional medical observation.
Thank you so much for your concern, many of you, including young Richard Barrett who was kind enough to send me a recording of his impressions of Sons of Arуas, which he is editing.
James, Eastern Baltimore County, Maryland, 7/17/21
