Ramón

After his 2nd tour of duty, Ramón’s world was a fuzzier place. Milkier too ..until he got the cataracts removed. The ground feels spongy when he walks because of the loss of sensation in his lower legs. I have a theory that says: what the body can’t feel, the mind fills in ..and sometimes with bizarre effect. For Ramón, it can make a dusty street feel like a rocky stream .. or level ground feel like an uphill slope. He says he’s learned to look for visual confirmation, but sometimes his eyes deceive him. He went to an optometrist but couldn’t pass the eye exam. He says he could see the letters clearly enough, but they would rapidly morph into other letters. For instance, an ‘M’ would become an ‘N’ then a ‘U’ then an ‘O’. When he mentioned this to the eye doctor ..she let him take the test over a few times. Ramón learned that if he blurted out the first letter he saw, he did much better. Out on the street however, phone numbers dissolve before he has a chance to repeat them. He can’t remember things he just read because when he gets to the end of a sentence, he’s forgotten the beginning. Now whole movies fade away by the time they reach the end, which he says is cool ..he can watch them over and over again as though he were watching them for the first time. I’d say the things that tethered him to mother earth have slackened a little, which accounts for the sliding sensation he gets in the pit of his stomach, the one he says feels like his car is skidding off the road even when he’s sitting at his desk.

Footnote: Music that used to annoy him ..dissonant-sounding jazz from performers like Coltrane or Björk ..now appeals to him. I put on the Beatles Revolution number 9 ..which sounds like a loop of recorded chaos and impromptu screaming. He was delighted. Then I put on a track of improvised rock recorded at a Grateful Dead concert. He said it sounded natural to him, like riding in the back of a truck on a winding road through the woods. This leads me to another theory ..when the mind adjusts to blur ..it can also make a melody out of noise.