A Poke in the Eye

So it started out with me stabbing myself in the eye with my glasses. It’s ironic if you think about it, to stab yourself in the eye with eyeglasses; I mean, eyeglasses are supposed to be good for your eyes, and yet, here’s mine stabbing me. (In case you’re wondering, I walked through a parking lot during a sprinkle, and, to avoid drops on the lenses, put my glasses in a pocket until I got inside—a bad plan apparently as I seemingly lack the depth perception without them to prevent optical injury upon putting them back on).

So okay, I get stabbed in the eye by my glasses; I’m fine. No worries. But then, as I’m driving around after that, I hear on the radio the news guys talking about the rain. “Oh it looks like another several days of rain, folks,” he says. “A long dreary weekend for us, and probably continued gloom until as late as Tuesday.”

Dude! What the hell? First off, we are having a water shortage in this part of California. Since when is rainfall a doom and gloom prospect for a state suffering a tremendous collective thirst? How is that a dreary prospect? I mean, imagine you and a friend are starving to death somewhere, like, really starving, and suddenly you find yourself standing before a giant smorgasbord with some big, burly bouncer telling you have to have to have at least two platefuls and a dessert or he will "break you," and then your idiot friend turns to you and says, “Damn, look at that heaping buffet over there, we’re gonna be stuck eating for a while. How dreary.” I mean, wouldn’t you have to reconsider your relationship at that point?

And on top of how wrong these anchormorons are, what the hell ever happened to impartiality in the media? Aren’t they just supposed to report the facts? I mean, I realize that they don’t bother trying to be impartial on stuff like politics or issues that impact the companies that own them or that those owners have a stake in, but since when did they start injecting their opinion on the weather so heavy-handedly?

So I was all, "This weather is only gloomy if you are an idiot. Go get another dose of UV from a tanning booth if you think all this water is a dreary thing.  We're in a drought for F-s sake."  Yes, I was yelling at the radio, but I was like, wow, really? Plus my eye hurt, which probably wasn’t helping my attitude.

So, talk about hurting my eyes, we go to breakfast after this, my wife and I. There’s this great redneck style breakfast restaurant that starts its breakfast selections with THREE eggs and whatever meat you like as the modest portion of the menu and moves to four eggs if you want to eat like a man. None of this pussy two egg or, I can hardly even say it, one egg, crap. No, this place serves actual breakfast to actual Americans who aren’t too beaten down by judgmental media and supercilious Europeans raising their querulous one eyebrow all Mister Spock-like at us because we are so fat. We are fat because we CAN be fat, so get off me Euro. I notice your continent is taking an economic crap too, so, apparently you people aren’t any smarter than we are.

Anyway, so I’m in there eating my giant breakfast with two pork chops and four eggs (yes, pork chops, made from SWINE, and, No, I am not afraid of getting a disease from pork, because I can read and so I understand that that is NOT how people get swine flu, and that the sky is NOT falling, and that there are many other things underpinning the impending “pandemic” that make the nonsense being said on the news and around the proverbial watercooler just piss me off and think that if the pandemic does kill us all it will be because God was looking down here and said to himself, “God these people are stupid. I never should have told Noah to make that boat.”

So anyway, yeah, I’m eating my eggs and swine breakfast happily, and I look up and I was like, “Woah, what the hell?”

There was this, like, seven foot he/she guy standing in the door of the restaurant… nay, not standing, he was filling… or, or, looming mountain-like in it. He or she, or, if I may say, “it,” was so huge and visually peculiar, that, well, I was taken entirely aback.

Now, I can already hear a bunch of you going, “Oh, that’s so mean,” and ,“He probably has gigantism and maybe combined with some form of trans-gender thing going on, cut him/her some slack.” And yeah, you’d normally be right.

If that were the only issue, I wouldn’t even be writing this. I get all that: Life deals us all a hand of cards and we play them best we can. But you see, besides being seven feet tall, somewhat misshapen on the scale of anything nominally normal—clearly man-like with a broad sort of Neanderthal brow and the over-all presence of someone who has bones thick as any fossilized dinosaur in a museum display, and sporting hair far too short to have been made pretty by the feeble, sort-of flickering-flame thing he’d tried to curling-iron into the patchy roadkill laying on his head--this issue I have with this man (or woman) grew from the fact that he/she was wearing this sheer yellow tank top that was as see-through as a nylon mask, and that by selecting this entirely revealing and inappropriate attire, he'd thrust his/her intimate places most glaringly into the visual realm of my breakfast reality far beyond anything approaching propriety. Think Frankenstein’s sex-change goes horribly wrong and he tries to compensate by covering it with a wet t-shirt.

So here is this towering behemoth of a transgender-ish person sporting broad, masculine shoulders to make Lebron James jealous and yet also thrusting a pair of soggy B-cups through his/her shirt in a way that made eating a large, steaming plate of country cooking nearly impossible to do.

I shan’t go into further detail, suffice to say there was no avoiding staring at the drooping pair of benippled gourds dangling there and glaring at me through that shirt, nor was there any way to hide in concerted contemplation of my plate once this person whumped down in the booth one table down and right across the aisle from me. It was like having Medusa sitting there. You know you must not look, but, all the snakes are writhing and, well, there’s boobs. Even the most hideous, misshapen boobs have gravity for a man’s eyes – either from awe or awe. There is no stopping the look. Doctors and researchers have tried. The project has been relegated to the scientific scrap heap with the alchemical impossibility of transmuting lead into gold. It can’t be done.

So, I tried to ignore him/her, to focus on my meal with Herculean studiousness (I'd say "Perseusean," but I’m pretty sure that’s not a word), but even purposefully looking into my plate left those purplish pepperoni stars hovering in the skies of my peripheral universe much to the chagrin of my now desultory appetite.

I truly try not to judge people on superficial things, but, well, in the words of a great observer of humanity and personal idol of mine, Oscar Wilde, “It is only shallow people who do not judge by appearances.” The point is not to judge because this person was different externally, and quite possibly unique and wonderful to know… the point is to judge when judging is appropriate; the point is not to be blind.

In this instance, clarity of vision suggests that the decision to go braless and in that shirt to a family restaurant does, in fact, render said individual less unique and wonderful than I deem worthy of better treatment here in this body of words. I refuse to be blind, or blinded by what is the “right” thing to think and say.

So anyway, somehow stabbing myself in the eye with my glasses was the ironical beginnings of a day leading me meandering to this point about not being blind. Sometimes I think I’m the only one who sees the world the way I do. Maybe I am. They say “beauty is in the eye of the beholder.” And, well, it's funny that the fantasy/mythological creature known as a "Beholder" is both monster and eye. Or maybe it isn't.