Last week I scratched my eye somehow, meaning I couldn't wear my contacts for several days. For nearly four days I was stuck with my dissident glasses, which make me look all radical but make me feel totally helpless and weak. You see, when I'm wearing my glasses, I am reminded how terrible my eyesight really is and how easy it would be for someone to just grab them off my face and stomp on them. It makes me feel like Piggy from Lord of the Flies. If I were stranded somewhere and my glasses broke—well, let's just say the other little kids could paint their faces and come after me in the night, and I couldn't do much about it. "Wait, there's a shape coming toward me! A bunch of shapes! Oh, it may be, yes, I think maybe they're people, and they're holding something that looks sharp, and ... arrrrrrggggghhhhh!" (Perhaps I was dictating.)

Wearing my glasses makes me feel like an evolutionary reject.

I've considered the option of Lasik surgery, but I don't know anyone who's had this done, and anyway I can't help but be a little wary of a procedure in which they use a frickin' laser beam to cut a flap in your cornea. I'd almost rather get a couple of eyeball transplants, like in Minority Report. That's another thing. Remember when Tom Cruise had his eyes bandaged and went stumbling toward the refrigerator, looking for the food the doctor guy had left for him, only to grab the wrong carton? Wearing my glasses reminds me that I, too, am just a lens away from drinking extremely curdled milk. No sir, I don't like it.

I had my yearly eye exam today. They put the puffs of air in my eyes, which I hate, because it's very difficult to keep your eyes open when you know what's coming. I also got to look in that machine that shows you the pretty cartoon picture of the barn with the phosphorescent grass and the white picket fence. I love that picture. Someday I'm going to steal that machine and put it in my living room. And then there's the visual field test, where they take you out to a field and make you find your way home without your glasses. I like that even less than the eye puffs, and it's hell trying to get those cockleburs out of your socks. What's that you say? That's not what a visual field test is? Oh, sorry—I must be thinking of when I pledged that fraternity.

Anyway, the optometrist says my scratched eye has healed, so hopefully it will be another year before my next ocular neurosis occurs. You see, last winter my right eye was attacked by an angora sweater, and it got all pink and inflamed. Every night I had to put drops in it and give it a motivational speech about teamwork. Once again, I had to wear the glasses, except that they were an old prescription so I was getting frequent headaches. Best of all, I had to endure this partial blindness for almost two weeks because, apparently, my lenses were handcrafted in a small South American village by a little old woman whose family has been making contact lenses using the same techniques since the days of the Incans.

There is really no point to any of this, except to say that I understand now why Harold Pinter was so fixated on eyeballs and that those of you with perfect vision make me ill. In fact, here's a little gift for you to enjoy with your flawless sight. (WARNING: not for the faint of heart) Just tab down until you get to Figure 7. Love ya.