Great Escapes, Thwarted

Reading vision has become impossible, even in larger formats. I need to scan almost everything to read at all, because I can change magnification and distance. Even when the mail comes in, I can no longer differentiate the shape of my name from my roommate’s to know whose is whose.
My brain is nowhere near as addled as some people would have had me believe. I fill in a lot by shape and recognition and color. I can’t see the words, but sometimes I can see where spaces between them are Without seeing the content of the letter, I can usually get an idea of the format and flow of the paragraphs. The more familiar I was with the typical format of bills and correspondence before the vitreous hemorrhage that spurt blood in my eye following a dose of Cialis, the better I am at identifying business from the same company.
When they make changes to format, the senders "blind me" further, in the same way I have recently decried of web pages changing formats. The changes deprive me of cues I have come to rely on.
Reading for pleasure is over for me. I can barely make out authors’ names and titles on book covers, and I’m not sure how much of that is familiarity with the book. The contents of books are lost to me. I was a lifelong collector and reader of science fiction and super-hero comics books. The habit is lost to me. Overall quality had been in decline for the past decade. I am aware that I had been enjoying the new-issue buying and reading less with each years of the 2000’s decade, but I had not yet been willing to give it up. A recent attempt to update myself online emphasized to me that the medium is certainly dying and that maybe I missed the escapism in theory more than actual practice. Still, I tried looking at one of the last ones I had ever bought and no augmentation could bring the words or pictures into focus. This triggered a new bout of depression.
I go through a lot of audio books and applaud Rhode Island’s integrated loaning system that allows me access to almost any audio book in the state. It’s still not the same as holding a physical book. Some things by English or foreign authors make difficult listening if the reader has a thick accent. Some of the classics become "unreadable" because skimming or glancing over the "boring parts and huge blocks of dense and often dated exposition styles just isn’t possible. I’ve learned a bit and finally "gotten around to" things I probably never would have read in "real reading." I’ve explored authors I had heard of and knew to be respected storytellers, but the shelves of esoteric and old science fiction–the field I write in–is lost to me. Much of it isn’t even in print any more, so there’s no chance it would find its way to audio form.
I maintain the mindset that I force onto most aspects of my life. I try to block out and ignore what I can’t do and what I really want, and try my best to content myself with the rest.