Since I was a little kid – back
when Michael Jackson was a black child – I began wearing eyeglasses. It was not a fun time because sports and most
activities were not designed by, or for, people with corrective lenses.
Some people are able to wear
contact lenses alas, I cannot.
Therefore, I am stuck wearing metal or plastic frames fitted with pieces
of precision-ground plastic, in order for me to see things.
Throughout the course of time I
ran across life’s speed bumps when I needed to augment my glasses with those
thin ropes that attach to them so that they can be doffed without actually
losing them.
They simply hang down from your
neck causing you to resemble a spinster librarian. But, they certainly keep track of your
spectacles.
I also had to endure the taunting
by other non-glasses wearing little pukes.
It seemed to be their job to encircle me and chant “Four eyes, four
eyes!”
It’s not nearly as much fun as it
sounds. But, soon, those quickly-approaching
geriatric conditions assclowns will be sporting their own glasses just to
enable them to find their toilets. But,
I digress.
Four eyes!!! I digress again.
So we must visit the adage by
Plato, “Necessity is the mother of invention.”
Each night when I awaken to make
sure I’m still alive and haven’t yet died in my sleep, I look at the alarm
clock. And each time I do this I must
squint as I make my way across the body of my sainted wife to look at that
clock.
You see, the alarm clock is on
her side of the bed because she knows how to set both the time AND the
alarm. When the clock was on my side of
the bed it perpetually flashed 12:00.
A few short years ago I came
across something called a projection clock.. it’s called that because it
projects the time onto the ceiling in big red numbers.
Even I can see the ceiling
without my glasses, allowing me eventually find the time whilst on my back, at
night, in bed. And all was well.
That is until this projection
clock lost one of its digital lines that help form the numerals.
You know what I’m talking
about. As the time advances little lines
turn on to shine in the appropriate areas of the display, thereby forming
figures that can be readily recognized as denoting times.
But three weeks ago, one of these
lines simply disappeared. It was the
top, horizontal line that formed the top of one of the second minute line. In other words, rather than reading 2:19 AM,
the clock projected 2:14 AM.
To the average reader, that’s not
a big deal. Sure, it’s only five minutes
off the real time however, I now want to know whether the line came back to
life or, is it still the wrong time.
To remedy this I merely climbed
over my sainted wife to check the time on the old alarm clock only to hear,
“What the hell are you doing???”
A brief explanation didn’t earn
me any miles.
This morning, though, the clock
lost another two red lines making 2:19 AM read 2:1U.
This disturbing event caused me
to begin doing math in order to figure out what time it genuinely was or could
be. My mind went straight back to my
classmates yelling “Four eyes,” and how much I hated arithmetic.
Then my sainted wife punched me
as I tried crawling over her to check the working clock.
I’m going to buy a new projection
clock today.
