Maybe you’ve wondered, “What happened to Cringely?” Nothing serious: I just stepped being able to read or write. Cataracts in my family hit like a hurricane, coming on suddenly and wth great force. It happened to my handsomer older brother two years ago and now to me. My medical care is through Kaiser, which does great work on such conditions, but it’s a bit like being in the army. First I wasn’t blind enough and then I was suddenly too blind, kicking me up to a slower level of service. I know, it makes no sense at all. In another 10 days I’m told it will all be behind me and I’ll have perfect vision like my brother. I hope so.

Mom always liked him best.

In the meantime I’m pretty useless. This column is being written with the help of my son Fallon, age 11. Fallon’s vocabulary is amazing but his spelling not so much. We’ve been hanging together a lot. He watches TV and I listen to it. We watched about 80 episodes of Cartoon Network’s Regular Show so last night I retaliated with all four episodes of Amazon’s Dr. Thorne. Fallon was not amused.

It’s hard to be a writer if you can’t read and my reading speed is right now down to about 10 words per minute. I talk to people on the phone, of course, and keep up with the news. Old IBMers keep trying to get me to write more about that company, which they claim has become a cesspool of executive corruption, but I’m not sure IBM matters anymore.

What probably does matter is the slightly sick feeling I see lately in many tech companies. Maybe we’re due for a shakeup. It’s been, after all, almost a decade of continuous growth and that allows a lot of bad systems to grow and thrive like we’ve seen at Uber, for example. There are lots of tech companies like Uber. Maybe the next recession will take a few of them down.

There’s more news coming on Mineservers and other Cringely adventures, but for the moment please just let me be blind and pathetic, okay? Leia the beagle loves me this way: every day she tries to steal my lunch.