When Joni Mitchell sang “You don’t know what you got ‘til it’s gone”, she was refer­ring to love and  the beau­ty of Nature. Hav­ing recent­ly lost – tem­porar­i­ly and not dras­ti­cal­ly – visu­al acu­ity in one eye, I can add a few more things to her list, and they’re not all bad.

My tem­po­rary diminu­tion of vision is the result of a tug of war between the vit­re­ous humour, the thick, jel­ly-like flu­id that fills the eye­ball and keeps it firm, and a bit of my reti­na. My Ital­ian eye sur­geon called the prob­lem a “puck­er”. I’m sure some­thing got lost in trans­la­tion, but it does rhyme with a scat­o­log­i­cal term I find appropriate.
To push the reti­na back in place, my eye­ball was inflat­ed with what is more or less air, which takes ages to work its  way out. Hence the haze, which for rea­sons  I know not, off­sets my “good eye”.
It’s pain­less, but has left me tem­porar­i­ly unable to read with ease or com­fort (or type this). And that’s where Joni’s lament words come in.
I’m a life-long, invet­er­ate read­er of both fic­tion and non-fiction.
The plus side of not being able to read com­fort­ably is hav­ing to be selec­tive, rather than over­ly con­sump­tive of polit­i­cal and for­eign news stories.
The U.S. media’s obses­sion with report­ing the pres­i­den­tial con­test  like a horse race would be fun if it was deliv­ered by a Ken­tucky Der­by com­men­ta­tor…Trump and Biden remain vir­tu­al­ly tied (Forbes)…Don­ald Trump con­tin­ues to hold an advan­tage over Pres­i­dent Joe Biden (CNN poll}…Vot­ers Broad­ly Crit­i­cal of Biden, Trump as Elec­tion Heats Up (Pew Research}… Biden Clos­es in on Gap With Trump (NBC News).
Writ­ten, it comes across more like a crap­shoot.

                    SKIPPING THE NONSENSE

A few para­graphs into a sto­ry head­lined “Trump Lead­ing in Five Key States”, I realised it was based on polls, which means what­ev­er else the report claims is basi­cal­ly mean­ing­less in any­thing resem­bling long-term, so I could stop right there.
A piece on the cast audi­tion­ing to be Trump’s run­ning mate who showed up to be his mouth­piece at the trail in Man­hat­tan quick­ly turned out to be a list of  hyp­o­crit­i­cal toad­ies, with prin­ci­ples and spines on a par with Sen­a­tors Mitch McConnell and Lind­sey Gra­ham. No fur­ther eye strain necessary.
I worked my way through an Op Ed by respectable Repub­li­can politi­cians form­ing a group which “ will be a cat­a­lyst for a move­ment to reassert tra­di­tion­al Repub­li­can­ism against the pop­ulist ver­sion it has become under Don­ald Trump’s”…only to find they are bent on sav­ing their par­ty and what­ev­er they see as Amer­i­can democ­ra­cy. All well and good in the long run, but  the effort to read it would have been more worth­while if they’d laid out a plan to save Amer­i­cans and the rest of us from – to apply his most favourite descrip­tion against him — the dis­as­ter of a sec­ond Trump sec­ond term.
And speak­ing of plans, the Gaza peace process is on the same ham­ster wheel of polit­i­cal chi­canery, nar­row-mind­ed­ness and myopic vision that has  been spin­ning for decades in an effort to bring dain­ty and hope to that part of the Mid­dle East.
Tak­ing a break from the details isn’t like­ly to leave me sig­nif­i­cant­ly under-informed.

                      SEE NO HEAR NO

Hazy vision also makes TV view­ing less than sat­is­fy­ing. Much of mine con­sists of dip­ping into and out of var­i­ous 24 hour news chan­nels. Their ten­den­cy to spot­light cor­re­spon­dents talk­ing is made tol­er­a­ble by snip­pets of rel­e­vant (some­times) video thrown in. Not being able to focus prop­er­ly on them reduces the report­ing to imi­ta­tion radio.
I love both lis­ten­ing to and report­ing for the real thing. The fun, chal­lenge and beau­ty of it was encap­su­lat­ed  in one sen­tence by the great CBS Radio news pro­duc­er Dick Kallsen, who was famous­ly adept at track­ing down TV cor­re­spon­dents for a ver­sion of any sto­ry they had for the evening news. When I said I couldn’t man­age it because my offer was a whim­si­cal end-of-the-broad­cast colour piece, Dick’s response was: “But dear boy, all you need to do for me is paint a word picture.”
Those who can do it seem to be an endan­gered species.
As for oth­er rou­tine things one takes for grant­ed, pru­dence also dic­tates that I stop dri­ving for a while. Being reliant on my Oth­er Half as a chauf­feur turns out to be anoth­er lesson.
 Appar­ent­ly, women have an even more finite tol­er­ance for back seat dri­ving than we men, clear­ly expressed in colour­ful ver­sions of  “If you don’t like the way I dri­ve, feel free to get out and walk”.
Who knew?
How many things vex­a­tious and oth­er­wise that I nev­er saw when I could see clear­ly is – no pun intend­ed – an eye-opener.
Joni was right…”Don’t it always seem to go…”

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