Post 782 - July 14, 2025

A few days ago, I was sitting down at the gym putting on one of my socks. I blinked and, suddenly, I was aware of a gigantic floater in my left eye. There wasn’t any pain or any physical sensation with it at all. There were no flashing lights. One moment, my eye was fine; the next moment, it wasn’t.

I was all the way downtown, so I started walking back up. I’ve had floaters in my eyes before, but never anything quite like this. At the gym, I could still see through it. After a few blocks, though, I couldn’t. I could see light and shapes, but everything else was a complete blur.

My eye doctor used to be a guy named Richard Lester, which, as you can imagine, was very confusing. Dr. Lester, however, retired. I called my current doctor’s office to see what I should do. They were just about ready to close the office for the day. After a little back and forth, I managed to convince them to stay open just long enough to have a look at my eye in case there was something I should do right away.

It seemed to take forever to get uptown, but I finally made it. After a whole battery of different checks and tests, my doc told me that he thought I had a detached retina. An appointment was made with a specialist for the first thing the next morning. Getting an appointment like that last minute was miraculous.

That night, I really thought long and hard about what life would be like if I were blind. I tried to prepare myself for that worst-case scenario. How long would it take to learn Braille? Would I be able to remember what things looked like?

When I saw the specialist the next day, he told me that instead of a detachment, what I had were two small retinal tears. He started cauterizing the edges of them with a laser. He managed to complete one, but was unable to finish the other, so another appointment was made for me to come in again the next day.

The next day, more of the second one was closed off, and then yet another appointment was made for me for this morning.

By now, looking through my occluded eye almost seems normal. It is amazing to me the things we can get used to. My right eye is doing most of the heavy lifting, but I am already far less aware of the shadowy blockage in my left. It’s still there, but I’m not fixated on it. I got through all of Broadway Barks! on Saturday without too many issues. It feels a bit like I am looking through a chain-link fence.

Like me dealing with my vision, in a very short time, we have all gotten used to living in a country that last year was one thing and now, this year, is something else entirely. We have reached the point where nothing coming out of the White House seems all that shocking to us anymore.

As a case in point, to distract us from his probable involvement in Jeffrey Epstein’s pedophilic sex ring, the President is threatening to revoke the citizenship of comedian Rosie O’Donnell.

Four months ago, a sentence like that would have floored us all. Today, it’s just par for the course. The President’s go-to defense is to distract us from his guilt with some outrageous statement about something else. That tactic is losing its power because it has happened so many times that nobody takes it seriously. When he says something that ridiculous, we now all look to see what it is he is trying to divert us from. He ends up having us focus even more on what it is he is trying to hide from.

I would say that what he’s said probably all but confirms that he is prominently on the Jeffrey Epstein client list. That means it is likely that Epstein procured underage girls for the President to have sex with. That his team is now denying that the list even exists seems to me to be all the rest of the evidence we need.

The tariff nonsense is in full swing. Nobody in the world seems to know what to do. On one day, off the next. Some world leader flatters the President, and suddenly they get a favorable rate. Someone else does something the President doesn’t like and, bam, a thirty percent rate is levied on something we import from them. I can’t follow what’s being taxed and what isn’t. I’ve stopped paying attention.

Farm and restaurant workers continue to be rounded up and sent to concentration camps. Again, that is a sentence that should stop us all dead in our tracks. Today, it pisses us off while we are thinking about it. After a minute, though, we get distracted and move on.

We asked a friend of ours in California how things were, and they responded, “It’s really crazy out here. Every gardener and house cleaner is in a state of panic. Entire communities are trying to do what they can to protect themselves against the raids. The farm fields are empty of day laborers. Strawberries will be a fortune this year.”

Israel has now floated a proposal that they will round up all the remaining Palestinians and hold them indefinitely inside a giant tented camp in the southern region of devastated Gaza. Hamas, unsurprisingly, is unwilling to enter a peace deal with that idea on the table. I don’t see any of it ending well.

The President seems to have finally turned against Putin. Given that he doesn’t have a single relationship that has withstood the test of time, it’s hard to be surprised. Elon who? Secretary of Defense Hegseth paused a delivery of weapons to Ukraine last week, which would seem to line up with what the Republicans want. Instead, the President resumed the shipments and laid Hegseth out on the carpet.

For his part, President Zelensky of Ukraine has announced that he is seeking to switch out his Prime Minister. Russia has escalated its attacks, and public mood in Ukraine is souring in light of the relentless bombardment. Recent polls show that the Ukrainian people are starting to doubt that they can win.

The office where I am getting my retinal tears zapped is down on the Lower East Side, not far from Veselka. Veselka is an amazing Ukrainian restaurant on 2^nd Avenue that has been open at least since I started living in New York in 1980. I am not allowed to eat before going in to see the doctor, so afterward, I’ve been going to Veselka for breakfast.

This morning, as I was sitting there enjoying my omelet and latke, the waiter noticed me looking up at one of the portraits of Zelensky hanging inside. “It’s nice to remember what a leader looks like,” I said. The waiter smiled and ruefully shook his head, agreeing with me.

The flooding in Texas has created enough of a public backlash against the Republicans’ gutting of Federal disaster management offices that the President has started to indicate that he no longer intends to wipe out FEMA completely. The Republicans are ever so slowly coming to realize what the rest of us already knew. Not everything the government does is bad.

Whatever cuts to the budget that Elon Musk and his DOGE bros made to our governmental infrastructure, the Big Beautiful Bill will completely erase them. Not only will our debt rise by trillions, but the systems we had in place to protect ourselves will be less efficient if not taken away. Oh yeah, is probably the response you’d get if you brought it up with someone.

After today’s laser session, it now seems unlikely that I will need anything more done. For the moment, I will be able to avoid surgery. In a week, the doctor will check up on me to make sure everything looks okay. For the moment, at least, blindness doesn’t appear to be something I will need to get used to in my immediate future.

The three doctors and umpteen nurses who have taken care of me over these last few days are fully trained professionals. They have put the time in to learn the skills necessary to do their jobs. Knock wood, they’ve accomplished the task I brought in to them.

We shouldn’t be getting used to anything that’s in the news now. None of it is anything we need to live with. All of it is repairable.

I should get my sight fully back, but until everything heals, I won’t know for sure. I can tell things are improving daily, so I am optimistic that there won’t be any lasting effects. In the meantime, I’m just ignoring the shadowy parts of my view. It should take a week or two to clear up. Or three. We will have to see.

If we were able to stop the Republicans from moving forward right now, it would still take years to recover from what they have already done. Since kicking them out of office right now is unlikely, however, our recovery period from their destructive idiocy is going to take significantly longer. It can only begin once we’ve gotten rid of them. The longer they are there, the more complicated the healing from what they are doing will be.

Our country seems to be slowly coming to the realization that maybe it might have voted for the wrong people. They aren’t fully there yet, but, like the sight in my left eye, it’s slowly becoming clearer.

Let’s not get used to any of this. None of it is normal. None of it is morally or even legally right. What we are experiencing now is criminal behavior. We do not need to stand for it. We can fix it.

Among the arsenal of diseases pointed our way., COVID is now just another thing we must fight off. It once shut down the entire planet for a year or more. Now it’s an annoyance. Our government, unlike COVID, is not a malady; it is a choice. We can easily choose something else.

We can fix anything if we put our minds and hearts to it.