My grandmother, God rest her, always used to say, “believe half of what you see and none of what you hear.” It is an expression I have used myself more times than I can remember over the past sixty or so years since I first heard it. The older I get, the more I see and hear, and the crazier the world around me has become, the more I have come to appreciate the deeper meaning of the lessons I have come to understand that she was trying to teach me. Wisdom, after all, comes not from the study of the lives of others but through surviving the trials and tribulations of your own Human Experience… something that only comes with time.

She also taught me to look for the good in people, look beyond their faults and their flaws and imperfections, and always insisted that we were all God’s children and that only He was perfect and it was His place, not ours, to pass judgment on others. I so desperately wanted to believe that growing up, I allowed myself to be “taken” on more occasions than I will ever admit to now.

In many ways, I’m actually happy that she has since passed on because I would not want her to see what has become of God’s imperfect children in whom she placed so much misguided faith.

Life has gone on in her absence, and – like everyone else – I have built up my own inventory of imperfections. After a lifetime of sometimes -questionable choices, I developed a medical condition that led to a series of Strokes, causing me permanent vision loss in the right half of each eye. They also tell me that I have some mild to moderate cognitive issues, which seems right but leaves me thinking that I actually improved in some of my cognitive areas in exchange for the ones I had to give up. Foremost among these? I am much better able to see people for who they really are, not for who my grandmother taught me to wish I saw.

The condition I have is called “Right-Side Homonymous hemianopsia,” It has completely changed everything about how I see, in the physical sense, my entire world. I have no peripheral vision, no depth perception, can’t work or drive, and, of what I CAN see, everything appears to me as if I were looking through a peephole in an apartment or hotel room door. And there is a huge hole right in the middle and to the far right of my remaining visual field.

I can only use a computer because of several software gadgets that allow me to dictate into a microphone and playback into my headphones… A painfully slow process, but when I’m happy to put up with it, given the alternatives.

The only reason I’m even making this information public is just so readers understand that, despite my challenges, I refuse to be helpless, and I refuse to rely on anyone for anything that I can figure out a workaround on my own. The way I see it… Until I’m fully blind or dead… There’s no earthly reason why I should sit around waiting for a change that will never come and forfeit whatever time I have left without sharing my experiences with anyone interested in following along.

Before I was (figuratively) struck by lightning three times, I was a successful professional educator, blogger, freelance writer, political ghostwriter, and all-around bitterly cynical asshole that had lost faith in the bulk of the human race. With these new gifts I have been given – partial blindness and dramatically increased challenges to understanding what’s going on around me – I find myself in the unique position of being able to “see” and share what everybody else is too busy and moving too fast to recognize and comprehend.

Say whatever else about me you will, but my life’s pace has slowed and forced me to stop and smell the roses.

This website intends to focus on the condition from which all of my fellow humanoids on this spinning little microscopic blue ball in the cosmos suffer: only seeing that which we choose to see. My job is to see it and bring it to your attention. Do with it whatever you will from there.

On these pages, you will find a mixture of content that spans a wide range of topics. Some of it is 100% my commentary alone, and some of it begins with a few lines of my thoughts before sending you on your way to the source so you can decide for yourself what to make of it.

Oh yeah… there will be profanity from time to time, so don’t get your undies in a bundle – do you listen closely to the shit your kids say when they think you aren’t listening?

Anyway… it is my fervent desire that you be given an opportunity to use all of your senses and step a little outside of your personal boxes to consider whether the world is as you have convinced yourself that it is or if maybe… just maybe… what you can’t actually see with your own eyes holds the better part of what life has to offer.

It is certainly what has happened to me now in my own life.

Apologies in advance for typos and grammatical errors… I’m half-blind, after all… cut me some slack.

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dave
I'm likely the first author you've met that can't read or write (3 strokes). Refusing to give up or be helpless, I engineered a way around my blindness and have written two books, with more coming soon. I invite you to follow along - I'm just warmin' up: David M. Poff @ Amazon

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