Now, before I rant I must say that I can see the advantages of today’s digital photographs and their explosion because I used non-digital and early digital cameras myself. It was sometimes very frustrating to have to wait to develop film, to not be able to do it oneself for all types of film, to have to carry around heavy equipment… there are obvious advantages to digital objects. I remember when digital cameras started being popular some friend (like a proper old man) insisted that physical format was clearly superior.

Ok, now for the rant. Digital photography bores me. Who gives a fuck about the thousand and one photos people take at a museum, a concert, wherever, that all look exactly alike.

I first started migrating out of the world of photography many years ago, when it really became very boring. That, by the way, is the reason why I started taking my sketchbooks everywhere. Anyone could click a picture of a flower (I’ve done it) but it’s harder to find someone who will sit and really see, feel a flower long enough to sketch it.

Then of course there’s the online obsession to click a photograph of everything and put it online, of which I’ve also been guilty. Bur once it was the realm of geeks. Now everyone and their neighbor goes it. It’s boring.

Photography used to require some sort of talent. Whether it was artistic like composition or merely technical in manipulating equipment, taking photographs was something not for everyone. Yes, you could say that is still true. Taking ‘good’ photographs is still not something everyone does. Using a camera is still not the same as clicking duckface selfies. But photography, rather than becoming better for it, has become cheapened I think.

Then there’s the question of how we have been changed by photography. Yes, rant, but do we ever think of this? We know that no-digital photographs changed us.There’s the very early photographs of a running horse, when people how horses really gallop (not at all the way that was thought) after which painters no longer painted horses running the same way (like Degas’ jockeys). How has digital photography changed us?

Well, I think it’s true. People rarely recommend music (they rarely recommend anything). I think this may have something to do with the disappearance of the music album per se and the turn to online music, when everything is immaterial and suggestions are universal, based on commercial success.

This may sound like an old man rant and partly I guess it is, but it’s not just that. Since the disappearance of the physical record from our daily lives (I’ve heard similar old man rants with the disappearance of LPs, cassettes, etc. I don’t rant about one specific format… I rant about them all) there is no longer any financial commitment from listeners to a specific music album.

I remember going to a record store back in the day (yep, sounds like an old man rant) and spending my precious money on this or that CD. But there was only chance to buy one or two. One had to think very hard what the choice was. It made sense to having listened or knowing someone who had listened to the music previously.

Then there was the artwork which the physical album was supported by. That no longer exists. It has nothing to do with recommendations, but that’s crucial in an old man rant. I guess it has a little to do though. The well-made album was a thing of beauty. I remember, for example, when I bought Massive Attack’s collection of singles, they came in really cool heat-sensitive boxes. I would definitely have wanted it if I had seen it previously.

Today, that’s largely gone. I could rant some more about the disappearance of albums, but I’ll spare you.

The dizziness is still here. It makes waking up a strange experience… I open my eyes and kind of feel around checking if I’m dizzy, but I don’t know for sure until I stand upright. Then I really feel it.

I’ve been trying to find another way of describing it, because I realise the people around me don’t understand it. Imagine those washing machines like they have at laundromats, with a “window” that gives you a glimpse at the spinning clothes inside. My head feels like that, from the first minute of the day until I doze off. And just like the washer, I’m not moving.

But my perception is.

It “quiets down” when I’m not moving. It doesn’t go away, ever, but there’s no motion to give me wrong info. The problem (if one can speak of ‘the’ problem) is that when I’m standing I feel like my surroundings are moving yet they’re not. My body reacts: I shift my weight slightly, move my arms, change my posture, etc. Since I’m not moving, the tendency is to topple over precisely when it’s the most dangerous.

Reading, writing, watching TV… they’re all ok since there is no motion to make a mismatch against. I still feel a certain sort of motion, like a rocking boat, but it’s not distracting.

Standing still, surprisingly, I can do quite well. I simply ignore any and all information coming from my senses and I know what instructions to give my body. Short walks, with support (so I can ignore my senses) are doable: I’ve now become an expert on how it feels to walk straight and what mistakes are most common.

Yes, it’s frightening, and exhausting too, to think about everything while you’re doimg and yet not be able to trust what I feel. But do I have a choice?

I don’t know if this is normal or unusual, but I see slightly different tones with one eye than with the other. The left eye sees a bluer tint, the right one is redder.

I first noticed it when I was in junior high school. I was playing basketball and some kids had been chosen to paint some sort of murals around the school yard. One was a big red and blue blob, or it looked like that, and I remarked that it had a cool effect of “popping out” to a friend, who said I was crazy. At that time the Magic Eye images were really popular and the effect was similar. The blue part seemed to “pop out” over the red (or vice versa, I don’t remember) but I was the only one that saw it.

I was intrigued so I started looking at it with only one eye open and that’s when I noticed the difference. It made sense, since red/blue was the combination in old 3D glasses and it matched the colors of the blobs. I kept on experimenting and the difference was very subtle but if I focused on it it was noticeable.

I don’t know if it’s always been like this, or whether for some reason it changed. But it’s been with me ever since. Which is the “real color”? Does it make sense to talk of a real color?

With certain low lights it’s easier to notice. Most of the time I’m not aware of it (the difference is really very small). And yes, when I encounter a red figure on a blue background (they must be very solid figures) they still “pop out”. I hadn’t thought about it in ages but yesterday I was lying in bed and the light was just right to notice it.

I guess it was sort of comforting to notice one thing at least about “me” is still here. I didn’t miss it or anything, but it’s a bit of continuity to hold on to that I rarely get.

Each day seems completely bland.

More therapies… for what? Let’s get real. I’ll hardly ever be in a situation where I’ll need them.

No travel. No food to enjoy. No going out. All I face is the prospect of years of therapy and little else. Yay.

Not.

I got a little taste of it this morning. Usually after I’ve had breakfast on a chair in the corner of my room, I stand next to a chest of drawers that’s by the bathroom door, where I wait for the nurse to set the bedpan for me to pee before I lie down on the bed again. While the nurse goes and empties the bedpan, I stand there holding the chest and I fix my pants. But today, I was wearing some unusually loose shorts and they dropped all the way to the floor. I crouched down to pull them up, but I felt the dizziness and before I knew it I felt my legs swaying and I was falling face-forward.

I (very luckily) didn’t get hurt. I fell on my knees and it was only momentary pain.

But I was (am) scared. We went to the nearby park during physiotherapy (like we go every Thursday) where I typically take a very small walk in one area of the park where there’s more solid ground. I felt the wooziness all this time, and by the time we were finished walking my body was shaking with fear.

I’ve made my peace with the dizziness (which I’ve no hope of ever recovering from, honestly) but it now seems to get worse, and I don’t know what to do about this. I guess I can’t do anything about it, but it’s one big hurdle I’m up against.

I had to look up “stye”. It’s the very first word, as far as I remember, that I had no idea how to say in English, whereas in Spanish it is quite common (perrilla). It’s not like I know every word in English, but it’s simply strange that such a common word in Spanish (at least in Mexico) slipped through my linguistic net for so long. Then again, it’s the first time I’ve suffered from one and it’s not like there are treatises written about them.

Yesterday I finished The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson. There’s a Netflix series by the same name. I say ‘by the same name’ and not ‘based upon the book’ because, although they both share the same name and they both have similar settings, they are altogether completely different stories. Other than some details, there’s no significant overlap between them. I was watching the series while I read the book, and it was a strange experience. All the time I was waiting for things that appeared in the book to show up in the series an vice versa, but it didn’t happen. Not that the series is bad. It isn’t great, but it’s watchable, in a very Netflix kind of way. Jackson’s work is in horror, but even this is different. In the book, it’s a very psychological terror that appears, while in the series it’s very visually-oriented. The setting is also different. In the book Hill House is the entire setting, almost like an extra character, while in the series it is one of many settings. There’s no use comparing them more, since they’re completely different stories.

As for which one I enjoyed the most… it was the book, I guess.

We were supposed to go out to the park today as therapy, but I knew I couldn’t walk around like this. I feel dejected, and missing out on therapy is not good for me, but being dizzy like this and walking, even aided, is too much.

I feel terrible. If after months of various therapies this is the outcome, I can only expect worse. I really wonder, what is the point of it all? That’s what keeps showing up in my head.

I will never enjoy even a walk in the park.

I wish I didn’t have the memories of my pre-stroke life in my head to tell me all I’m missing out on. But I do. Every single day I have to drag myself through knowing that tomorrow will be more of the same. It’s like a Greek myth… the man that endures torture all day knowing that tomorrow he will wake to exactly the same.

Now that I think of it, that’s probably what makes it worse: not living the nightmare, which is bad enough, but knowing it will not stop.

The first thing I did after waking up was to take my medicines. In goes the very first pill and I felt something like a little click in my throat (there was no noise: it’s just what it felt like) and I knew, I knew, that the pill had gone down the wrong tube.

I immediately started coughing like crazy. But it was more than the usual cough. I started retching horribly, and I was very scared. I couldn’t even react, just coughing with my whole body, feeling like I was done for.

I kept on coughing for a while, completely tired, until at some point I felt like the pill had come back to my lower mouth and I swallowed it. But it left me exhausted and afraid all morning.

How was your day? Started better than mine, I suppose.

But I still feel like the right hand isn’t quite there yet. When I’m holding a pencil and it’s on paper I feel a bit more control, but any activity off the paper turns too hard.

Even on paper, sometimes the result isn’t quite what I expected. This morning, for example, my physiotherapist asked me to sign some attendance forms. Now, my signature has always been with the right. All these months post-stroke I’ve been signing with the right and it came out with varying degrees of legibility but I could always recognise it as ‘my’ signature. However, today, I very confidently began to sign the papers but a strange squiggle emerged. Sure, the inclination of the squiggle lines were ‘compatible’ with my signature (I thought) but the squiggle itself was… just a squiggle. It was nowhere near my signature and this was the first time that had happened.

Anyway, it was strange.

Yesterday morning I noticed that water was going down uncommonly easy, and then in the evening it was back to normal: the moment my attention was lost, I started to choke very badly.

If it sound exhausting: yes, it is. Very. It’s been almost two now and a half years since the stroke and there are few things that I can do without thinking very carefully about them.

I know this is the new reality, that it’s now this way and there’s no other way, but that doesn’t make it easier.

I’ve begun to use my right hand for writing. I never used it because my neurologists said ever since I was in the hospital that it had been permanently damaged. Partly I was also afraid of failure.

I started noticing since using my left hand that I was losing control of my right. So if it could go worse, it could also get better, no? Well, I decided to try. The results were… mixed. It doesn’t obey me like it did, but it was not as bad as the medics had warned. It definitely has less control than my left, expected, but still feels strange for me. Lines which I know, my brain knows, my eyes know, should be straight turn out wavy, and sometimes my hand just has a life of its own. Kind of when you get an electric jolt and muscles just move on their own accord.

But it still feels more ‘natural’ than when I tried using my left, even if I felt more control. It was an eerie feeling, as I was discussing with a friend yesterday, like I was feeling a phantom limb. My eyes, my brain sent the message “move straight” and my hand would obey slightly better (of course, I’m reconstructing the process with words, when it was mostly automatic) but I felt like I was watching someone else’s hand do it.

It’s also strange because the process was pre-stroke fully automatic and now I have to pay focused attention to it. I’ve been drawing (literally) since I was in my crib and it was always like that. A few times I’ve drawn in public and didn’t realize that a crowd had gathered around me, so absorbed was I in it.

Now experiencing it and also paying an observer’s attention is a completely new way of doing it.

Everything else remains unchanged. Tomorrow a relatively new nurse is coming in. I say relatively because she was here last week, but with all the bustle it was a very abnormal weekend. Now things are much more normal, so let’s see how we adjust.

I’m reading an anthology of Shirley Jackson, who is best known for her work in terror. I’m currently going through short stories, and they’re weird as hell. Specially today, in a different world, they read strange. Her characters veer towards the female, but female very much from the mid 20th century: worried about what the neighbors will say about the garden, the specific clothes they wear for an occasion like moving (!), etc. You can tell that Jackson was writing about things that today would seem strange, and that she saw as strange, but went largely unquestioned in her own time. Thing like racial prejudice which were also ‘normal’ in her time also make an an appearance, which lends further weirdness to an already weird author.

Overall, a very interesting read.

Not much has changed. Then again, why should it? The world’s most powerful human being is still an orange-skinned rubbish TV star/bully and the rest follows from there.

There’s still war (waged by some or other plutocrat) all over the planet and some or other politician blaming some or other politician for the state of things in some or other place. Then some or other team beat some or other team somewhere and some or other event gathering an assorted number of celebrities bla, bla,bla… It’s the same rubbish I read before the stroke, except now there’s more ‘news’ about AI and how it will do some or other wonderful new thing.

It made me feel really sorry for journalists everywhere. They’ve been writing the same crap for over two years, with barely anything new, and I suspect they’ll be writing it for a long time to come. It must be really boring.

Reading it was.

I had physiotherapy earlier today and the dizziness was stronger than usual. It’s the first time that I really felt that I couldn’t do a series of exercises, and it made me feel terrible. I think the hot temperature is not helping either.

I feel severely demotivated and quite low in spirit. I am forcing myself to write, but don’t really feel like it.

It makes sense to me and it’s something I’d briefly looked into before. I don’t want to get my hopes up, but the man is reasonable and a nice person, so it’s worth a shot.

After the appointment we went for breakfast to one of my favorite cafés, then we went back home for a bit and in the evening we had a family lunch where a lot of my cousin (and their kids) also went.

It was lots of fun. We hadn’t had a family get-together in a long time. And it led to me and my male cousins remembering some wild trips from back in the day and re-living some crazy anecdotes. And we pigged out.

Anyway, after the full weekend today I’m feeling really tired. It’s not surprising. I’m not used to so much activity, plus yesterday was a long day.

It’s a place near Cascais which goes by the name Boca do Inferno, or Hell’s Mouth, I guess because the way the waves hit the rocks.

It was also the first time we had been back to Chicago since we lived there as children (I was about 8 years old). I remember that age as the last time I was really happy. After two years there we came back to Mexico and I hated it. I guess ever since I did my best to leave, more or less managing it as an adult, until the stroke.

During the concert there was a guest singer that didn’t make it because she had fallen sick, and in her stead Ane Brun came in as a substitute. She became one of my favourite singers and I got to see her live in London once. She has a truly wonderful stage presence: like I imagine a true diva of days gone by.

T

So, here’s a photo of Portugal the lost notebook. It was the last day I spent in Cascais and I walked all over and found this old bridge and nice view, some rocks to sit on and just sat and took my notebook out.