Cultural Senses

A week and two days after my eye operation I've at least another week of heavy drug use, as the hospital makes adjustments to the procedure they undertook. Feeling healthy in myself, but with a red, blurry eye; needing to stay near to home because of the regular eye drops I need; and also needing plenty of rest; the key challenge for week two is going to be boredom. I can't easily read, watch television or use the internet - or rather these are the "eye" activities that tire me out most. I can't go anywhere for long, either. Didsbury, for all of its pleasures, is full of shops, restaurants and bars; it doesn't - unless I get religious - do contemplative spaces. If the weather is nice, like it was on Thursday, then there's some nice parks.

So my cultural senses are on a ration; only the ears get continual stimulation. I've a tottering pile of discs next to the stereo; and I've even been digging out old vinyl favourites. Be careful for what you wish for of course - a couple of weeks recovering after, say, a broken bone, would probably give me plenty of catching-up time on my reading, but I'm pretty sure that the thing I'm least capable of doing this week is picking up "Summertime" or "The Children's Book."  Maybe I'll see if I can read an hour a day of J.G. Ballard's "The Drowned World" for the next SF book club, even though I know full well I won't be able to go along to it. I've found the internet the hardest thing to keep away from; and with good reason; its a 2-way communication space - and with Twitter, live streaming and other such things, a vital "real time" place to "hang out." There's nothing like a couple of weeks of enforced isolation to improve one's understanding of the challenges for anyone is housebound. It's clear that unless I'm into online poker or World of Warcraft, we've still got some way to go into creating a really interactive web. Surely there should be some conversations I could join in? I "attended" a virtual event in Liverpool on Thursday, which was okay, until, "that's it folks, we're off down the pub." This virtual viewer was suddenly left to his own devices.

The one thing that "recovery time" does give you is time to think - and though this can be a bleak time to be doing thinking, I've noticed that because I feel pretty healthy in myself, I've been feeling pretty chipper. Life, for once, is on pause, and I can't do much about it. Rather than cramming a dozen things into each day, I'm spreading them out. The intense concentration required for creativity is a bit beyond me at the moment; this blog post is more than enough challenge for now.