I have something in my eye. It’s been there for several days now, somewhere in the heart of darkness behind my eyelid. So whenever I blink there’s this little stab of irritation, which on it’s own is not so bad but the cumulative effect of all this little blinks over the day is building up into a much bigger throbbing sense of discomfort and pain which makes the whole side of my head want to smash itself into the nearest wall, anything to release this neverENDING AGONY OF EYEBALL TORTURE!!!
Sorry about that – but there’s something about the eyes (windows to the soul and all that) which means when they not working properly in any minor way it’s like the whole of your body malfunctions in sympathy. Simple tasks like walking without stumbling into the nearest stationary object become impossible, you lose your appetite, your friends, your family, your reason for existence all because of some insignificant piece of grit has worked it’s way into the back of your ocular sphere.
You would think though that being robbed of perfect vision would not be a problem for me, given that I spent the first eight years of my life (yes you read that correctly, eight years) squinting and stumbling about the place like a miniature blonde Mr. Magoo before anybody realized something was not quite right. My early years on this planet are an excellent example of I think of how you only have your own experience of the world to go by, especially when you’re a child. I had always assumed your vision was something that improved as you aged and the fact I was constantly talking to complete strangers in public I assumed were my parents was just one of those that disappeared as you got older.
I can remember (I resist the temptation to put the world ‘clearly’ in here because clearly that wasn’t the case) the circumstances under which it was discovered I was in fact half blind. Every night I would take up residence in our front room – inches away from the TV screen – and every night my parents would drag me away, then over the course of the evening I would squirm back into position. One night there exasperation with this had obviously reached a limit, and they told me in no uncertain terms if I wanted to watch television again I would have to do so sat on the couch with them. “It’s alright for you,” I said. “You’re adults, you can see better.” The penny dropped. You would think the fact both of them wear glasses might have clued them in on their son’s myopic tendencies a bit sooner – but obviously not.
So a trip to the opticians was hastily arranged. Sitting in the darkened room for the first time the optician asked me to read the top letter on the board. I wriggled and squinted, but I couldn’t really make it out 100% – so I went for the letter ‘A’ which it sort of looked like but it was as it turns out the letter ‘H’. Up went the lights and my mother was beckoned in for a confrontation, which she has since described as the worst moment in her parenting history. The optician asked me to repeat my guess at which point it became apparent to all parties I had reached the age of eight years old not really being able to see a goddamn thing.
That was the start of my spectacle wearing and it was the days before trendy designer glasses so I spent the rest of my childhood festooned in thick, NHS specs, which would fall apart or fly off at the merest hint of physical exertion while visually was a little like living inside an ice-cube. However one side effect of wearing glasses, apart from the headaches and pitying stares, was that I no longer had to sit at the front of the classroom to see what was going on. I could now retire to the back where, away from teacher’s line of sight, I discovered much more mischief and general bad behavior could be conducted. Wearing specs pretty much dictated the course of my academic career from then on.
There would still be occasions when I had to revert back to my pre-sight days– think Han Solo after he’s been released from carbon freezing – and I can remember several amusing myopic incidents such as going fro a swim at the beach and on return speaking to a French family for 15 minutes before realizing mine were actually several hundred yards away, and if I remember rightly I also played rugby for the wrong team for a reasonable amount of time before I realized my error.
It does make me wonder how my ancestors survived and us spec-oids are here in the first place. Surely they would have wondered into the nearest tar pit or been facing the wrong way in battle so how does the shortsighted gene get passed down, and with such dominance when it would appear not to be beneficial to the reproduction of human kind. Or perhaps not – I mean how many people do you see in nightclubs with a pair of specs on – when you consider how visually unappealing the human offal found in your local meat market at 2am is perhaps the myopic chromosome helps get it done in the first place.
