Tongue-In-Cheek … Foot-In-Mouth

The main problem associated with getting older is that the warranties on your body parts start to run out around age 50, like, for example, the warranty on your eyeballs.  And before you know it, in order to read the newspaper, you have to move the newspaper further and further away from your face until eventually you forced to hold it in a different galaxy.

I’m also finding that I cannot distinguish between different sized and shaped objects. Everything from balls to boats appears to be dark fuzzy blobs, but which look a lot alike.   This can be a real problem if you are playing baseball.

EXAMPLE

“Hey, ump!   Seriously, I can understand fastballs, curve balls, sliders, and knuckleballs.  BUT the pitcher just whipped a battleship past my head, or it might have been a destroyer, but it was definitely some sort of boat, or maybe a whicker chair.  But it DEFINITELY wasn’t a baseball.  Okay, it might have been a baseball, but it was a baseball shaped exactly like a battleship, or a piano.”

Look, I’ve been writing for you long enough to know what you are thinking, you’re thinking: “Bill, get glasses.”  And I’m thinking, “But I will look extremely poindextery in glasses, and I’d rather risk driving into a bridge abutment than to look a nerd.”

As a result of my unadulterated vanity, I’ve been walloped in the side of the head by handbags wielded irate women who thought that I was ogling their chests, when in reality; I thought I was looking at topographic maps of mountain ranges.  I also have been spending HUGE amounts of time squinting.  Squinting does seem to help some, even though walking around with your face scrunched up like you just ate an entire crate of lemons can be a little off-putting to people who do not know you, who do not know what you are doing, and who do not know that you are too much of a narcissist to buy glasses.  They just think you are some sort of weirdo, but not a glasses-wearing geeky dweeb, and that is important from a vanity perspective.

Honestly, further problems can arise from not wearing glasses: becoming separated from your wife when at the mall, and then trying to nonchalantly find her without making a public spectacle out of yourself.  And the trick to finding a missing spouse when you cannot see two inches in front of your face, is to casually stick your arms straight out in front of you (like Frankenstein) and violently begin moving our fingers in an attempt to feel around for your wife, and you do this while talking and saying things that will attract your specific wife over to you, well, in this case my specific wife over to me.

Before I tell you what I said, I want you to know that I said what I said out of complete utter desperation.  And if any of my friends overheard me saying what I said they would have figured I had finally snapped my twig.  God forgive me for my words:  “Okay, honey.  So, what do you say you go buy another pair of shoes?  Yes, I realize you already own nine thousand gazillion bazillion pairs of shoes, but you can always use another pair.  Go ahead; I will even give you some of my newspaper column money.”

While I was saying those horrid words, the dark fuzzy blobs keep moving away from me, which meant they were not my wife.  Finally, one dark fuzzy blob did not move, so I felt my way over and continued with my shoe talk thinking all the time that this dark fuzzy blob was my wife.   About five minutes later, the crack overdressed mall security team attempted to arrest me for trying to buy a pair of black high-heel pumps for an ATM machine.   Potential jail time is what finally convinced me to get glasses.

However, once again, we fall into looking like a major pencil-neck geek, so I opted for contact lenses.   Easier said than done, because contact lenses sound good on paper, but have you ever tried to intentionally put your finger into your eye socket with your eye open?  Let me tell you, there was lots of blinking involved, which resulted in the contact lens sticking to the outside of my eyelid, which didn’t so much help with my being able to see stuff.  Contact lenses go against everything in nature.  Using them is along the lines of eating Brussels sprouts—they are good for you, but it’s just oh so wrong to eat them.  I finally settled on a pair of glasses with very thing wire frames.  Actually, they don’t look too bad, and most of the time I can tell one dark fuzzy blob from another.

Anyway, seriously, I don’t need my glasses for everything.  In fact, I probably don’t need them when I write my columns.  Okay, admittedly, the last time I tried to type my column without having my glasses on I ended up typing on the dog.  And she really got annoyed whenever I hit what I thought was the “backspace” key.

But I can to do it, seriously, no kidding.  And I will prove it right now.  I will type with my glasses on, and then, without telling you, I will remove them, and I guarantee you that you will not be able to tell when I have them on and when I have them off.  Ready?  Okay, so here I am typing away, and now upoi ro;; ftt dmfpi;ut;u mp gohhtytmbt rjdufptnty om m,u sno;oyu yp po[[;poo yjr z78675675 trd ppgglssf satiaiduien,auiy oujoip.

Copyright © 2008 Bill Drury.  All Rights Reserved.

Bill Drury is a humor columnist for The Carriage Towne News.  Contact him via snail mail c/o The Carriage Towne News, P.O. Box 100, Kingston, NH 03848, or email him @ Drury1234@Verizon.Net, or to go his website @ www.billedrury.com.