Friday, March 6, 2009

Blinder Than Bats

In a matter of days my buddy is going under the knife, at which point his eyeballs will be tossed into a Petri dish and split open like tiny coconuts. This marks the second attempt at weakening his favored eye in the hope of strengthening his nearly blind one. Grotesque as that sounds, it’s a typical procedure for astigmatism sufferers. A successful operation would prevent the crossing of his pupils, currently marring scores of photos and cursing him with the same leering gaze reserved for villainous megalomaniacs; the kind of people that forever seem preoccupied with, say, plotting the destruction of the Superfriends. Never trust a man with a wandering eye, folks. He’s always looking around for the next best thing, only half focused on your own musings toward (pick your poison) economic collapse, bad sex, or high-impact colonoscopies.

After botched surgery numero uno, my friend was presented with an adhesive strip for one lens of his glasses. The strip contains hundreds of microscopic prisms which refract light in such a way as to force the weaker eye outward, avoiding that DC Comics world dominator expression we discussed. Think of it as having the cover of Pink Floyd’s “Dark Side of The Moon” stapled directly to your brain’s occipital lobe. Painful, perhaps. Trippy, perchance. Necessary, yes.

Nonetheless, there’s more to that patch, and frankly, I don’t trust it. Any man wearing a sensory exciter over his eye is sitting on a boatload of bionic abilities, untapped or otherwise. How many months before the wearer begins to see through clothing, burn holes into walls, or shoot laser beams out of his sockets to combat the forces of evil (or annoy the bejesus out of his friends)? And forewarned is forearmed, the gift of x-ray vision probably effects more psychological harm than good. Take a few rides on an off-hours New York City subway for evidence of that. Still not convinced? Need I remind anyone of the insane visor screwed onto LeVar Burton’s face in ‘Star Trek: The Next Generation’ to combat his blindness? Let’s just hope the doctor gets it right this time.

If surgery numero dos is as painfully unproductive, doc’s going to have to prescribe extreme measures, perhaps mandating residence in a crystal cave – like the arctic leaning Fortress of Solitude where Clark Kent deflowered his beloved Lois – guaranteeing an eternity of favorable light refraction. If my buddy has to live like Bizarro, rambling in a backward-throated growl at the ass end of the earth for visual survival, so be it. Real estate on the northern tundra probably runs cheaper than Boston townhouses anyhow, given the menacing climate and months of darkness; you know, all the Arctic Circle nonsense which doesn't concern highly leveraged mortgage holders in the states. Suddenly that high-impact colonoscopy sounds pretty good, no? That's right, bend over and smile.

* * * * *

In sixth grade my psychopathic shop teacher mandated the viewing of a film he dubbed, cruelly, “Tomato Soup.” The event was well known, appreciated among former students as a rite of passage before proudly going forth to manufacture crooked toolboxes. Plot wise, the protagonist, a welder, eschews goggles in exchange for an eyeful of metallic shards. Set to eerily trippy 1970s music, we flash forward to a hospital room where needles are plunged into a bloody puddle (the socket) surrounding a grossly misshapen eyeball. While students groaned, our instructor pumped his fist with the zeal of an old codger winning big at the track.
Joking aside, I can still see that mangled eye in every bowl of Manhattan clam chowder, cultivating a wicked nausea to this day. Unfortunately, the adhesive strip on my buddy’s lens is a temporary fix at best; a shoddy plug in a leaky dam. Surgery needs to work the second time around. Otherwise it's crystal cave time. And honestly, there’s not a snowball’s chance in hell that I’m flying up to the North Pole for occasional beers, especially on this unemployed shoestring of a budget.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Ah ha! There is only one Jew I know who went to such lengths to see the Jesus everyone keeps talking about, that he subjected himself to this barbarious method. It would've been cheaper to buy a beret.

MVD said...

Actually, it would've been cheaper to simply go blind and lease a helper monkey from the nearby zoo.

And personally, I'd rather stick a Jesus on my car's dashboard than have some surgeon scoop out my eyes and readjust the muscles until they refract heavenly light.

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