Meanwhile... Pt. 1

**zryson** · 11-04-2012, 12:25 AM

Well this is awkward, a male neighbor has left flowers for me. We are not close. We do not even talk that much. I'm not really sure how to respond to it so until now, my response has been a non response because I don't want to offend him. But I also do not want to encourage him.

**zryson** · 11-04-2012, 05:24 AM

Had fun at the stores on the weekend. Was a nice day. Not too much wind. Was good just to buy a big stack of comic books. Mostly bronze up to current day comics but some silver age comic books were thrown in too. A lot of them are being given away as I go through them, just enjoying them and reading them on my desk or atop my blanket on my bed. And its kinda fun. Just to enjoy the comics. Not to worry about what should be bagged or not bagged.

**Polar Bear** · 11-04-2012, 07:42 AM

Well, this is a part of aging that had never occurred to me.

I'm in my mid-forties. My close-up vision is going, and at different rates for my two eyes. On the one hand, that makes it slightly more difficult to grade papers or read a book, but that's not a big deal. This, I expected.

What I hadn't expected is how this affects my comics reading. I can no longer appreciate super-fine detail. Even perfect printing, like on Fantagraphics' Barks volumes, looks imperfect. It's not bad, certainly--it just makes baxter look like newsprint and newsprint look like photocopies. It's readable. I can recognize artists in a heartbeat. It's just--it lacks that crispness I'm used to.

I'll mention it to my optometrist, and I'm sure he'll be able to provide me with glasses that will fix the problem, but ... well, I treat comics as an escape, especially as a reminder of childhood, and it's painfully ironic to have to read the things of my childhood wearing bifocals.

**dan bailey** · 11-04-2012, 08:29 AM

Your plaint very much reminds me, Polar Bear, of when I got glasses back in, I believe, the fall of '75, not long after I turned 15. The optometrist that we used in Texarkana (my home county was too small & backwoods to host such a service ... & besides, prices were supposed to be considerably lower in Texas, probably for tax-related reasons) happened to be only a couple of blocks from the small used bookstore I frequented. When I went by there as usual with my new glasses in place, I distinctly remember thinking that the mid-to-late-'60s comics on the floor in small stacks by the door looked noticeably smaller-dimensioned & finer-detailed than what I was used to.

I knew my improved vision was almost certainly the reason, but I wasn't 100 percent convinced of that till we got home & I could compare those comics with the ones I already owned.

Oddly enough, as I've certainly mentioned before, after wearing glasses through my 21st birthday & contacts for the 2 decades or so after that, I haven't needed corrective lenses in the last dozen or so years. After I went to my optometrist back in Little Rock to report that I wasn't getting any noticeable benefit from wearing my contacts & thus probably needed a stronger prescription, he conducted the usual round of testing & decreed that I was one of the lucky few whose eyes had entered sort of a plateau phase during the standard middle-aged transition between near- & far-sightedness (or something like that) that requires bifocals, & that in the meantime my vision was A-OK.

Supposedly, that respite was going to last, I dunno, maybe a half-decade or so; as noted, it's been twice that or more. Then again, I haven't seen an optometrist since.

As long as I seem to be seeing things clearly & don't start suffering frequent headaches (as with a lot of us, I guess, in early adolescence those were the telltale signs that I needed glasses; I remember being able to see the blackboard just fine from the back of the classroom in English for most of 9th grade, but by the end of the school year the writing was really hard to make out ... I'd been having rather regular headaches for at least a year before that), I guess I'll let things ride.

Hell, if anything I've probably been more headache-free the last few years than ever, though I suppose a good part of that might be the comparative lack of stress spelled by the end of my deadline-fraught newspaper days.

If my vision has indeed somehow corrected itself (I know that wearing hard contacts can reshape the curvature of the eyeball to beneficial effect, but I always wore soft one), I suppose I should see whether I can now play the piano, too. Or even ride a bicycle. Or maybe even draw.

My hearing, now ... that's another matter altogether. Apparently, tinnitus doesn't self-correct.

**zryson** · 11-04-2012, 09:54 AM

Hey Polar Bear; about the eyes I got mine tested a while back and the specialist said they were technically both great but slightly out of phase with one another. So I get a blurry effect (or as I prefer to call it, a soft touch effect). He recommended I try glasses so I wore them and whoa, it was too much. The detail was really off-putting to me because I walked around thinking "Gee, is this what normal people see all the time? No wonder people are so stressed!" So I don't wear them much.

**dan bailey** · 11-04-2012, 10:33 AM

Just like yesterday, sitting here at home but might as well be at the office. My nonprofit employer's having its first upper-echelon board meeting under a brand-new governance structure on the same weekend we're launching major missions in response to Hurricane Sandy is ... less than great timing, at least for the online editor & news-release-sender-outer (normally the guy above me does that, but he's on vacation, & the department supervisor could no more accomplish anything of that magniture online than she could fly to the moon by flapping her arms), especially since I'm nominally an hourly employee.

So it goes; at least I've got a job that's pretty much within my skill set, which wasn't the case from 12/02-6/06.

**Jezebel Bond** · 11-04-2012, 06:00 PM

Seen Skyfall 3x in the UK....opens here this week so I'll finally see it in IMAX...

Have some new comics to post up too...after I unpack...

**zryson** · 11-04-2012, 10:06 PM

Had the option of purchasing a comic collection of some 3000 books for under $100.00 but decided against it. Why? Well it meant driving to another state and secondly I was only thinking of buying the entire lot for charity. Its a crazy price though. Less than $100.00 for some 3000 comics. But so many people are dumping their collections and moving onto other interests. Some are just so desperate for any money they slash the prices downward to try and drum up interest. Where this is leading for the overall collectors market I am not sure?

**zryson** · 11-05-2012, 05:02 AM

Everywhere we look these days there seems to be bad news. Crumbling economies. Reports saying people are more stressed and have excessive anxiety. The technology which brings us together seems to be driving more of us apart and making people feel lonely and isolated. But when I step back and look at it, with open eyes, the reality is that there has always been bad news. Life has always been fragile. Sometimes overwhelmingly so. I guess what has changed is that many people seem to have lost hope. They feel very alone. Often I see people telling others they are not alone but I'm not sure it changes anybody minds. For myself, when I feel down I like to read. Books, magazines, comics. Sometimes even the newspaper (how old fashioned of me). Reading has always been an escape for me. And I read a lot. Many people I know just sit for hours in front of a television. Usually complaining there is nothing on. All the while I will be curled up with a book in front of me. The evocative words printed on the page taking me from this world into another time in history.

**Polar Bear** · 11-05-2012, 05:41 AM

Why not buy it for the $100 and then take $1 off for each comic you donate? Paying $100 for a $3000 charity write-off seems like reasonable financial sense to me.

Originally Posted by zryson

Everywhere we look these days there seems to be bad news. Crumbling economies. Reports saying people are more stressed and have excessive anxiety. The technology which brings us together seems to be driving more of us apart and making people feel lonely and isolated. But when I step back and look at it, with open eyes, the reality is that there has always been bad news. Life has always been fragile. Sometimes overwhelmingly so. I guess what has changed is that many people seem to have lost hope. They feel very alone. Often I see people telling others they are not alone but I'm not sure it changes anybody minds. For myself, when I feel down I like to read. Books, magazines, comics. Sometimes even the newspaper (how old fashioned of me). Reading has always been an escape for me. And I read a lot. Many people I know just sit for hours in front of a television. Usually complaining there is nothing on. All the while I will be curled up with a book in front of me. The evocative words printed on the page taking me from this world into another time in history.

Good reflection, very nicely written.

**zryson** · 11-05-2012, 07:08 AM

I think the reason I decided against making the purchase was the factor of having to drive to another state and also pick-up the entire collection. I would have had to rely on somebody to accompany me and I just did not know if that was possible due to other factors involved.

**dan bailey** · 11-05-2012, 08:21 AM

Originally Posted by Polar Bear

Why not buy it for the $100 and then take $1 off for each comic you donate? Paying $100 for a $3000 charity write-off seems like reasonable financial sense to me.

Looked at purely in a dollars-&-cents vein, it'd probably be worth it ... but even so, that $3,000 would of course translate to considerably less once the various machinations involved in applying itemized deductions to one's tax declaration are completed. It's not like the donor's tax burden would automatically be reduced by a flat $3K; instead, it'd be some fraction thereof.

Of course, I'm neither a tax lawyer nor an accountant ... but I was married to an IRS employee, so as far as I'm concerned my thoughts on these matters are worthy of being engraved in stone.

**mrc1214** · 11-05-2012, 02:11 PM

Originally Posted by zryson

Well this is awkward, a male neighbor has left flowers for me. We are not close. We do not even talk that much. I'm not really sure how to respond to it so until now, my response has been a non response because I don't want to offend him. But I also do not want to encourage him.

You should respond with flowers and a invite for dinner who knows where it will go.