At long last, I am scheduled for cataract surgery later this month. On both eyes, a week apart.

 

By mid-October I will enjoy vision in a way I haven’t in ages. And boy howdy, am I ready for it!

 

I will be getting a medium-distance correction lens installed each eye, since my near vision is pretty good and my distance vision is okay. The glasses will be bifocals to help improve my near and distance vision.

 

I can’t afford the Cadillac version. I can only afford what Medicare and my supplemental plan will cover, but the eye doctor thinks the solution will be fine. I’ve worn glasses my entire life since  age seven or eight. I can continue to wear them. They’re a part of my public identity by now. I look naked — somehow unfinished — without them.

 

In Other News…

 

Not a single soul has bought the extended edition of LET NO DAY DAWN THAT THE ANIMALS CANNOT SHARE, so I am adapting my mindset to accommodate a new reality: one that proclaims that I can retire FULLY now without feeling I’ve left anything unsaid that still needs to be said in prose or poetry.

 

I’m extremely close to simply hanging up my shingle as a writer

and just savoring the brief lifetime I have left as a nonproductive, quiet, reclusive member of society.  The idea feels immensely freeing, albeit risky because I have so little saved for retirement. (Women make significantly less during heir working careers than men do in the same jobs, even though we usually live several years longer.)

 

Of course, retiring completely will hobble my ability to do anything extraneous beyond mere survival, but I have built a life that I don’t really need any kind of vacation from, so I don’t feel particularly alarmed by the restrictions to my future activities. I do know I’d better die before I’m 82 (nine years from now) because I will not be able to afford to remain alive and independent even if I am still ambulatory and of sound mind unless Social Security payments increase quite a bit or I move to a less-expensive nation.  Money is always going to be tight. It always has been tight. We Creatives are used to that reality, and no one is hiring 73+ year olds these days.

 

I simply have to stop thinking/fretting about what the future holds.

I can’t change my circumstaces. Everything has always worked out before. It will again, or it won’t.

I can adapt, either way.

So, yeah…

 

I think everyone should be able to retire, even those of us who love what we do.  Because if no one wants it, why do it?

 

Doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result is the very definition of insanity.

 

I’m BEYOND ready to stop beating my head against the wall.