"C'est la vie."

While working in the garage yesterday, I quite suddenly noticed an obstruction in my right eye, as if a long lock of hair had fallen over it. My hair's not that long anymore. I brushed whatever it was aside, or tried to, but it wouldn't budge. I sat for a moment, covering my eyes with my palms, to no avail. The swirl remained. I thought that maybe I'd just suffered a stroke, but no numbness appeared. I thought for a moment that This Was It, the great exiting wave, overcoming me when I least expected it. This really pissed me off! I felt myself prepared for a lingering death, one where I could at least showcase my detachment, but a squirt of squid ink in my dominant eye, that I had not considered and so I felt completely unprepared, insulted, really.

I begged off the dinner date The Muse had scheduled with our friend and hovered around home, lying quietly listening to a baseball game and pondering my imminent demise. This morning, I scheduled a visit to my optometrist, where I learned that this was no big deal, one of the side effects of aging, a "floater" of rather mammoth dimensions, but nothing capable of bringing me down. By then, I'd already driven around while peering through the damned thing and had come to realize that it had no mortal designs on me. I was still ready to buck up and die if need be, but my emotional preparations turned out to be premature. Such is maturity.

She dropped some mildly stingy drops in both eyes to examine closely and basically confirmed what I'd already concluded. The floating obstruction should completely dissipate in eighteen months or less. Until then, I peer through that old, once reliable lens rather darkly. As daunting as that experience certainly was, more disconcerting trailed closely behind. I decided to restart my computer this morning. The camera had not been working for a few weeks and I decided, in a moment of really stupid inspiration, to restart the damned thing. So I did. Once restarted, the video camera worked just fine for my morning conference call, but I was immediately set upon to reenter my password for all the apps for which I had grown sublimely unaware even had passwords.

I'm still sorting through the resulting mess, besieged by pop up reminders that I should enter my password. Of course, no template appears to facilitate this entry and I have no idea how to comply, Dismissing the helpful reminder just encourages another reminder to pop up, and me leaving town tomorrow morning. I confided to a friend that these sorts of events usually take three weeks to resolve. Apps I purchased long ago suddenly can't remember me. My security thinks I'm some unknown interloper. The old reliables stop being reliable anymore. I should have remembered. Restarting, something I might attempt every six months or so, seems to completely baffle almost every app. I need to reconstruct my formerly unconscious personna with scant help from my once old reliables.

Such is aging, I guess. The old operating systems start failing to keep up. Even a reset short circuits the whole operation for a time. I'll be back in operating condition, but not before I know good and well that I fell out of operating condition for a spell. The threat of falling out again will hover a little more closely and, no, I will not manage to write down my new passwords in any more accessible place than I ever have. I did find that scrap of paper where I'd written down all my password, but of course none of the apps recognized any of those written down passwords, probably because they had banished me since I'd written down my passwords and coerced me into imagining another one in moments when no scrap of paper was handy. So it goes.

I will, over the next couple of weeks, progressively learn to ignore the pop-ups insisting that I enter my unknowable password. Everything except my security seems to work fine without that security, and I'll find an opportunity to call those people and ask them why they threw me, an old reliable customer, out on the trash heap. Because I restarted my machine? What flimsy technology we rely upon these days. My eyes are increasingly proving to be flimsy technology, too. As a life-long observer, I should have suspected that they'd be the first to go. The Gods have this tradition to uphold. They always go after the center of an existence, never the periphery. I must, I guess, become my own seeing eye dog. It will not surprise me that much when, one day, I'll awaken to find a pop-up filling my visual field, asking me to enter my password without offering an input mask to receive it. This won't matter much, because I never even knew my perspective was operating under the auspices of a password and I won't have a clue then what it might be. C'est la vie.

©2018 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

Tags: #AnotherSpring, #PureSchmalz