Monday, July 08, 2013

My Eyeglasses

I have more eyeglasses than most rich people.  Seriously.  Like Donald Trump, I bet I have way more glasses than he does.  You say The Donald doesn't wear eyeglasses?  Okay, Warren Buffet, then.  I have more eyeglasses than Warren Buffet and Bill Gates combined.  In fact, I'm wearing a pair of my eyeglasses right now, and from where I sit, I can see a whole nother pair on the coffee table.  And I'm pretty sure there's a pair in my bedroom.  I have so many eyeglasses, I don't know how many eyeglasses I have.

Ask any of my friends, they'll say, "Oh, yeah, I got a pair of Man's eyeglasses.  He left them here last time he visited.  I'm just holding onto them until he returns."

Why, you ask, have I amassed such a fortune in eyeglasses, am I mad?  Or brilliant?  Years ago I had just one pair of eyeglasses.  They were the first pair I'd ever owned.  How proud I was, like a new poppa who's just given birth to black frames and a pair of lenses.  They were prescription, and I'd spent the afternoon having my eyes dilated so I could get them.  I'd also spent sixty-five dollars.  The eye doctor had told me all sorts of fascinating things about my glasses - the frames were a special plastic alloy, the lenses were bullet-proof, stuff like that.  One thing he didn't tell me was don't put your eyeglasses in your back pocket.  This is a thing you'd think eye doctors would be required to say.  You'd think eyeglass labels would have a silhouette of a dumbass putting glasses in his back pocket with a red bar - the international symbol for "Don't do this, dumbass!" going straight through it.

Short story long, I sat down with them in my back pocket.  Do you remember the scene in Gone With the Wind when Scarlet O'Hara holds a turnip up to the sky and vows, "With God as my witness, I'll never go hungry again!"  Well, it was the same thing with me, only with a pair of eyeglasses, and I was swearing I'd never go without eyeglasses again.  Actually, I wasn't swearing anything that specific, I was just swearing.  It was more like *!!##@%&!.

So that's my story.  Every time I go to the Dollar Store, I stand at the little Dollar-Store-Eyechart, and buy four or five more pairs.  And now, Casa Martin is pretty much an Eyeglass-o-Rama, and when I put a pair in my pocket, or step on them, or inadvertently run over them with a steamroller, I just laugh.  Plenty more where those came from, I say, plenty more where those came from.