too much light makes baby go blind

by space at 07:39 PM on April 29, 2002

Well, since we're talking about painful eye stuff lately, I'll share my most recent ocular adventure.

It was a few weeks ago. I'd started a new pair of disposable contacts (they're good for 1-2 weeks; I wear them 5-6) that morning and was driving to Target. The first day of a new pair is wonderful after enduring the crust of mineral deposits and bacterial corpses that develop on lenses being pushed to three times their expected lifetimes. Your eyes feel light, clean, ungluey. And you can see.

As I drove, my left eye started hurting. That's not unusual, I often get eyelashes on the edges of them, and there's just some general discomfort involved in the wearing of contacts. Gradually, however, the pain grew worse and worse, until I had to clutch my hand over my eye. But I couldn't bear to touch it. It was so bad I could barely keep my right, unaffected, eye open. Tears were pouring down the side of my face and I was chanting "fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck." You can do that instead of crying, you know, and no one will make fun of you.

Unfortunately, Target is one of those "out by the highway" places, and there really is no place to pull over. I figured that I might as well go that far: at Target I could buy some contact solution, after all, if I needed to wash the lens before reinserting it.

I made it to Target, somehow, and parked in the first available space, approximately seventeen miles away from the store's entrance. There, I plucked two-thirds of my contact from my eye. There must have been a tiny tear in it when I put it in, and the movement of my eye and eyelid exacerbated it until the lens tore completely in two. I don't know where the other third went. It could still be on my eye, for all I know.

I had made it all the way out to Target, what was I going to do now? Driving home half blind wasn't going to be fun, but it wasn't going to be more difficult an hour from now. So I went into the store and did my grocery shopping, trying to keep both eyes open while only seeing through one. Normally I keep one eye out for attractive young women when I'm at the grocery store, but since I only had one, I kept it on the food. Given the trouble I've had with beer goggles, it seemed best to avoid any possible entanglements while in this state. I mean sure, she may have appeared good-looking, but who knows? The right half of her face could have been completely unnattractive. There were only a few temptations.

I made the trip back home without incident, (I'm not counting that accident as an incident, it was an accident. Totally different thing) and popped in the next contact from the pack when I got there. As I put away the groceries, I told my roommate about my cyclopian adventures. She spotted a tofu package among the food and asked me, "Tofu! What the hell are you going to do with that?" She is a vegetarian; I am not.

"Tofu. Huh. Well, I couldn't see what I was doing. I was actually trying to buy sausage." That wasn't the truth, of course: I wanted tofu, I was starving, jonesing, ravenous for tofu, but it seemed to resettle the order of her universe, and in such cases lying is acceptable. We need our delusions, after all.

For example, when I go out with that girl I met at the grocery store, I just take out my left lens and insist that she drive. Whatever helps you get through the day, you know? That's all I'm saying. If you gotta be half-blind, go with it.