I've been putting off a visit to the optometrist and I've been trying to figure out why. My first thought was that I've always associated poor eyesight with weakness. I can't be the only one otherwise Superman wouldn't have found a pair of glasses such an effective disguise. It always seemed that it was the bespectacled kid getting punched in the face at recess and you didn't even need to see his glasses hit the ground to know they would break and need to be taped up to make it through the rest of the day. Sympathy for the kid was always in short supply because while all the other kids always imagined him perched over a chess board and while they knew how all the pieces moved they never knew how to play.
I never wanted to be that kid.
I don't like to think that my hesitancy is caused by the fact there are so many eye charts out there that it is impossible to study for the test. I understand that it's not a pass/fail situation but I don't like to be unprepared. Sure, I might resent the dryness of the exam (would it kill the makers of the eye chart to make I C U P the second line?) but I can't believe that I'd be so intolerant of the stuffiness of the process that I'd risk the health of my eyes (do they think that a little humor would eventually result in some eye chart manufacturers adding more and more outrageous content until the final line of some eye charts would be a string of profanity?).
Maybe it's a fear of weakness on my part. As much as I wouldn't want to wear glasses I don't think I could find it within myself to have LASIK (laser-assisted in-situ keratomileusis) surgery. I just don't trust lasers. I picture myself sitting there in the chair after a quick blast with a smoking, empty eye socket. Screaming, crashing around, the whole shebang. Not trusting lasers seems to indicate I don't trust technology and by not trusting technology it seems I don't trust my fellow man.
I don't so I'd end up wearing big clunky glasses while the other people who had bad eyesight but had the stones to get the surgery can now blend in and not get beat up at recess anymore. They blend as I crash around conspicuously all because the girl behind the counter didn't have the heart to tell me that the giant black frames I picked make me look like a cross between Buddy Holly and someone even dumber looking than Buddy Holly.
As an aside, nobody has ever said that I have attractive eyes so I'm left to assume they are like my nipples and are ordinary on their best day.
When words start to get blurry it freaks you out. For awhile you can blink a few times and will your eyes to focus a little harder but eventually the blurriness starts to hang around and you realize that 20/20 vision has an expiration date and that could be the reason that you don't want to go to the eye doctor because he'll sit there in his white jacket and confirm that time is passing and that you're not as young as you used to be and you never learned to play chess and the kid that used to get beat up now wears contacts and owns a large company and you're afraid that having poor hindsight would be too ironic for you to bear.
Can you blame run-on sentences on poor vision?
I'm going to go ahead and say yes.
Before they had glasses people just saw the world get fuzzier as they aged. Perhaps that's the way it's supposed to be and wanting to see things clearly when we're old as hell is an unnatural desire. There's a part of me that thinks the world looks better hazy around the edges.
So I put down the phone and put off the appointment a little longer because once your eyesight starts to go your hearing will think it's ok to start slacking and the next thing you know you can't get a boner without ingesting liberal amount of pharmaceuticals that have side-effects ranging from blood in your stool to not being able to get boners ... which seems a bit redundant because if I've got blood in my stool I don't think there would be any boners on the horizon.
I don't want to live to see that ... clearly.