I told you a few days ago about my eyeglass adventures.  I need a new prescription but to keep my cool frame I had to send the glasses away for seven to ten days.  Since my only remaining pair is sunglasses, my visual life has two choices – dark and focused or light and blurry.

I’m on Zoom a lot with the Evolutionary Collective.  No sunglasses since with them I couldn’t see the screen and people wouldn’t be able to see my eyes.  Part of the time I’m in Gallery View, seeing anywhere from fifteen to forty-eight folks … fuzzy little rectangles.  When I’m doing a practice with a partner, that person is large in Speaker View, and also is fuzzy.  Not a real problem.

Watching tennis or a movie on TV, I need the focus, so on go the sunglasses.  My living room, day or night, is pretty dark.  Really only a minor inconvenience.

But something is happening to me over these days.  More and more, I’m vacant, faded, dull.  How very strange.  I’ve enjoyed working on my physical fitness over the past few Covid months but I’m a universe away from hopping onto the ski machine downstairs or my bicycle out on the roads.

I’m not tired.  I don’t have a headache.  No nausea.  No angst.  But I am slow, especially mentally.  There’s a floating feeling that’s not at all blissful.  And the slowness is not a graceful dance.  It’s a plodding.

There’s a sense of “Where am I?” without the wonder of spiritual mystery.  It takes me back many decades (1985), spending two weeks in a Vancouver hospital with a heart condition.  That time was far more urgent than what I’m experiencing now but there’s a parallel.  I remember being allowed out of bed, and my room, to sit in a wheelchair.  I was on morphine.  Spirits floated down the hallway, moaning.  Their feet never touched the ground.  Their gowns waved behind them as they passed by.  So slow the journey past my eyes.

Well, that sounds dramatic.  No painkillers in the here and now.  No see-through humans.  But the same vague distaste.  The same veil covering my aliveness.  The same feeling of not being home.

Costco … please hurry up