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My vision sucks like a vacuum with a brand-new bag. My eyesight is so poor, the optometrist doesn’t say “what’s the smallest line you can read;” he says, “Just point at the wall.” The kids didn’t call me “four eyes” because that wouldn’t have counted the two I was born with.
So I’ve been considering surgery. I don’t consider that lightly; I’m terrified. As poorly as my eyes work, they are critically important to me. I realize the value of decent eyesight because I so rarely enjoy it. In other words, it’s easy for me to imagine being blind, at least functionally so, because that’s how I wake up every day.
A friend with a comparable case of myopia was telling me about his recent LASIK experience. He’d been impressed at how easy and painless the whole prodecure was. He summed it up as a “non-event.” With admirable nonchalance he described the operation: the cocaine drops to deaden the nerves in the eyeball… the insertion of a speculum to keep the lids open… the incising of tissue from the cornea… the reshaping of the stroma via excimer laser…
The longer he talked, the more nauseous I became. True, I’d had a number of beers the night before, and the number was about 12, so I had a head-start on nausea. But the idea of someone taking a knife and slicing off the front of my eye is enough to make me writhe. I had to squat down on the grass and do breathing exercises.
I’m well aware that, afterwards, painful and grotesque medical experiences make fun stories, as if all the fear and anxiety suffered in advance pay off in entertainment value months and years later. I’m sure I could work up the courage to pay someone lots of money to cut a flap in my eyeball and shoot a laser into my skull… as evidenced by my friend’s experience, it makes a great story, and he wasn’t even going for the gross-out. My version would doubtless inspire acute squirming, even in people who weren’t hung over. And yet, somehow, I’m still ambivalent.
Surgicaleyes.org is a terrific resource, in both the common meanings of the word. The Image Center provides simulations of post-surgery vision abnormalities. The Bulletin Board contains tens of thousands of messages from doctors and patients, providing hundreds of pages of intelligent, generally well-researched commentary. It’s epic.
John — thanks for the inspiration, the story, and the link.
So it’s Wednesday, and I’m thinking I should write something for my journal, and as in all quests I take my first step: shove the plan aside and read my email instead.
But there’s nothing there, because I checked my email 10 seconds ago. And then I remember that Wednesday is “Cheap Eats” day, and I decide I’ll write about my celebrity neighbor and his irreverent foodie newspaper column, which is published Wednesdays in the San Francisco Bay Guardian.
Being constantly on guard for your welfare, and maximizing at all times your debris.com entertainment dollar (be a good lad now and click a banner eh?) (that’s a pitiful ad-revenue joke from the depths of 1999 for you) (you can forget, after that display, whatever it was I was trying to claim about providing anything resembling entertainment I guess) I decided to read today’s column before writing about it, although, really, the real reason was because it allowed me to postpone the somewhat arduous task of composing words for this space for a few minutes longer.
And then I got the shock of the week, besides last night at 2:30 AM when I was trying to sleep after having just seen Red Dragon and the noises outside the bedroom sounded like the neighborhood deer and turkeys but might also have been nutballs with buckknives and soft-palate defects sitting in a tree, when I read about myself in the second paragraph.
Honestly, I didn’t plan this. It’s just synchronicity.
Read about me (!) — Cheap Eats 10/9/02
Finally, after a year’s delay, the Triumvirat remasters are shipping. I know you’ve never heard of Triumvirat, but if you own any of these classic concept albums:
or, really, any neo-progressive rock from Yes, Genesis, Camel, Transatlantic, Spock’s Beard, ELP, Porcupine Tree, etc., then you ought to check out these two albums:
Nostalgia is powerful juju. A dozen friends, caught it its diamond-plated and keen-edged grip, were forced to strap drums about their persons and march in formation around a cold asphalt parking lot at 7:30 on a Saturday morning, just a few hours after having closed down area bars the evening before. This was described to me as fun, although that was earlier, before the hangovers and back pain had set in.
Still, the juju reached me up in the stands, and I had moments of regret about my decision to participate in the marching-band reunion only in my traditional capacities, drinking, storytelling, inspiring of embarrassed laughter. (Hey, it’s a knack.)
I have fond and vivid memories of my college years (and, given the types of recreation I pursued at the time, I have a number of other memories that come entirely from secondhand accounts) and none of it seems that long ago. That’s my subjective time. This weekend I got a faceful of perspective, and I realized, deeply and truly, what an old geezer I’ve become. And I don’t believe I’m going to age gracefully. This was proved over the weekend, when instead of pursuing activities suitable for my, err, current level of maturity, e.g. sitting around a warm fireplace with a blanket over my knees waiting for the kind nurse to come collect my teeth, I went carousing, and felt pain. After two such nights, I woke up to find my knuckles raw and bleeding — not because I got into a fight, not at all. I think it’s because I’d regressed so far the night before, my hands were actually dragging on the ground.
(The true explanation is even more pitiful: I’d forgotten to pack hand lotion. Sigh.)
I realized with dismay that the enormous pile of cash recently spent by my alma mater to remodel its stadium did not include sufficient budget for bathrooms. Or perhaps the designers were attempting to match the existing architectural style, and keep with tradition, for in the men’s rooms they’ve installed troughs in lieu of urinals.
There are a number of reasons why troughs might be appropriate, or even preferable. As one friend remarked, if a stadium patron is feeling discomfort and possesses an urgent desire to use this sort of facility, a trough tends to be more accomodating, in the sense that it’s somewhat easier to crowd around it without any of the social pressure that would prohibit the alternative (sharing a urinal).
One might suppose that troughs are more space-efficient than urinals. Looking at a long wall of troughs, it’s easy enough to imagine dozens of men standing elbow to elbow. But this projection is inaccurate. Indeed, I believe that the overall throughput of a trough-equipped restroom is lower than that of a more, or in this case less-traditionally fixtured restroom.
During my long wait in line, I immediately saw two reasons why. The first is that men tend not to want to stand too close to one another in the restroom. Lines had formed at 3' intervals — urinal spacing, I realized — and it was clear that everyone acted as if privacy partitions separated each line.
The other problem is more serious. I stood in line for nearly ten minutes, which is an interminably long time for a person who’d just sucked down two liters of water. There were only a handful of guys ahead of me, but each one took minutes: a few seconds to approach the trough and arrange the necessary interfaces as it were, maybe 15 seconds to actually urinate, and 90 seconds in between to excise whatever demons had taken over the circuitboard, to allow nature to complete its call. In two words, the trough system is crippled by stage fright.
That, or everyone had prostate trouble. Maybe next time I should use the restrooms in the student section.
OK, I’m better now. Feel free to rehash this analysis at your next office lunch gathering or cocktail party.
