I recently FINALLY got around to switching my Windows 10 installation to Dark Mode.

For those who dunno, that means things default to having a black background, and other Windows elements are similarly dark.

You could call it Goth Mode, really. Or easily Overstimulated Due To Depression mode

Anyhow, it’s been quite soothing on my weary old eyes. Way less of that glaring white background makng things hard to read and tiring out my poor beleaguered eyeballs.

Speaking of which, Julian was nice enough to drive me to Vancouver for my eye appointment with Doctor Mackay at St. Paul’s Hospital at 1 pm today.

Google Maps told us that the trip would take between 26 minutes and an hour. Out of an abundance of caution, we left at noon, figuring that the worst that could happen is that we had to kill some time in the area before the appointment.

And thank God we DID leave at noon, because as it was we barely made it on time.

Not sure how Google Maps thinks it’s possible to make that trip in 26 minutes, but I am pretty sure it involves a police telephone box that’s bigger on the inside.

I checked in at reception, which was a bit of an ordeal because there was someone in line ahead of me and my legs were already hurting like hell.

My legs seem to be hurting more and hurting earlier in my walking around lately. I hope this does not mean my as yet undiagnosed condition is getting worse. I don’t want to have to figure out how to live without walking.

I mean, wheelchairs are great for getting around outside, but not so great for getting me to the bathroom or the kitchen and back.

I can imagine becoming one of those guys in a wheelchair with ridiculously well built arms and shoulders from hauling themselves around their living via ropes, trapezes, pulley systems, and the like.

I would really miss being able to get my own food. And, well, go potty^[1] by myself.

Anyhow. Made it to the appointment on time, and through reception, and then came the usual tests. Although I rather like the main eye imager at that Eye Clinic at St. Paul’s more than the clunkier way that do it at West Coast Retina here in Richmond.

The one at St. Paul’s just asks me to stare at a blue blinking light. And that’s very easy to do. It’s quite bright and shiny. Hold my focus quite well.

And I may be wrong, but it seemed able to take a number of different kinds of images of my eyeballs, unlike the rigs at West Coast Retina.

After that came the waiting. I should have known to expect a long wait before Doctor Mackay could see me, that’s what happened the first time.

But i was so wrapped up in just getting there and back that I didn’t think of it.

Next time, which is March 19, I will bring my dang tablet.

I fear no wait time as long as I can entertain myself.

When it happened, my consultation with Doctor Mackay was fairly brief. Basically, he told me that there were two potential approaches to fixing my wonky eye.

The first was surgery, which would take place next Tuesday, followed by some lasering to make sure the eye doesn’t start bleed again.

The other was to do another injection next month.

And seeing as the eye has gotten a lot better ever since the first injection, and I didn’t want my eyeball peeled and scooped, I opted for the injection.

Not looking forward to that, because it fucking hurts, but it beats the alternative.

More after the break.

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What if sunsets were enough?

At the risk of sounding like a nature nut, there is a spectacular and profound light show that happens twice a day, dawn and dusk, that anyone in the world, from the poorest urchin to Elon Musk, can see for absolutely free, and it’s beautiful and wonderful and inspiring, and most of use don’t even notice it at all.

Myself very much included.

And this is true for all the wonders of nature. Green is still green and pretty and it still feels lovely under our feet. Pigeons live their little live among us and we never give them a second thought. Blue skies are a nearly universal cause for joy.

But we don’t notice and we don’t care. Myself very much included.

But why? Is it a labour theory of value thing? These wonderful things come too easily for us to be capable of truly valuing them?

Maybe. But I think there is something more going on. Something a little darker.

I think that consumer capitalism raises us all to be greedy little piggies who are constantly grubbing for more, more, more.

And that makes us all inherently hostile to the very concept of “enough”. After all, if we ever say, even silently within our own minds that we have enough, then some element of the cosmos might here us and stop us from getting more.

As if, in our minds, we are imagining that the universe was just about to give us a million dollars but then heard us say we had enough and changed its mind.

And so when it comes to the pleasures of nature and other simple joys of life, we can’t allow ourselves to enjoy them too much or we might find that, horror of horrors, we have enough when we have very little indeed.

And that would be the worst, wouldn’t it? Imagine being content with a life of watching dusk and dawn, touching grass, and watching the birds.

People would think there was something seriously wrong with you.

And yet, wouldn’t you actually have it better than everyone else? Being happy with things you know you will get every single day? No competition, no struggle, no fight, and all completely free?

But we would still think someone like that was seriously broken.

So the question is : why?

What’s so wrong about it? Is it that this person has escaped the proverbial rat race and the continuous demands for more? Are we that disturbed by someone else’s happiness that we have to condemn them as crazy or retarded or both, lest we start feeling tempted by anti-consumerist thoughts?

Is it that much of a threat to society for people to be both happy and poor? And not just “happy being poor but with the expectation that there will me more later”, which is how middle class people see the temporary poverty of early adulthood.

No, I mean being both happy and poor with no desire for or expectation of advancement. Happy working the grill at McDonald’s till they are old and grey. Happy, even, living on social assistance.

What a loser, eh? There must be something seriously wrong with that guy.

But he is happy. And we… are not.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.