I have a sort of hazy memory to share. I was a kid, riding in my parents' car on a bright sunny day, and we were sitting in traffic on a bridge over the Dulles Toll Road in Northern Virginia. I looked to my right, where you could see several miles of the highway stretching off toward Dulles Airport. Hundreds of cars streamed in both directions.
Far off, wayyyyy the hell out there, where the cars were just little dots, the sunlight glinted a little differently off the chrome armature of a police cruiser's rooftop lights, on the half of the highway headed toward our bridge. Because our family's succession of beater cars often had (or seemed to have, at the scale of a small child's experience) things like busted taillights and expired tags, and because by then I'd been in the backseat at least a couple of times when my dad had gotten alarmingly irate about being pulled over, I had learned the habit of looking out for cop cars and speed traps. So I said, to no one in particular, "There's a cop coming," and pointed.
What made this memory stick in my mind was that when my mom, in the passenger seat, turned and looked, what I was pointing at was so far beyond the range of her eyesight that she could not discern that there was anything at all there, much less that there were individual vehicles, much less that one of them could be identified as a police car headed our way, distant enough that we'd have to wait a couple of minutes to be able to verify it. For all that she could see, I could have been pointing at the clear blue sky. I might just as well have told her I saw Neil Armstrong's bootprint on the surface of the moon.
At the time, this registered to me as an impressive feat of eyesight, because I was a small kid and a small kid simply cannot turn down the possibility that they have Super Eagle Vision. And it's true that I did have very strong eyes as a kid, though certainly not of the superpower variety. Later I had a chance to try on my mom's eyeglasses, and then a little while later I became wise enough to examine those two inputs in their shared context. She simply did not have eyeballs that worked.
When I was 20 I drove across the country, from Northern Virginia to Seattle, to visit Mount Rainier. My brother, who'd traveled to Seattle by plane, rode with me on the trip back, but I insisted on doing all the driving so that I could complete the there-and-back-again. Halfway across the country, approaching Chicago from the west—we'd started that morning in Chamberlain, South Dakota—out of a combination of impatience to be home and not having enough money left for lodging anywhere but the direst and most horrible of roadside motels, we made the decision not to stop for the night, but to keep going for however long it took to complete the trip.
This wound up taking 22 and a half hours. The bleakest section of it was Interstate 70 in western Pennsylvania, which in broad daylight passes through a lovely patch of the world but at unholy hours of that night was so much worse than I ever could have imagined. The Allegheny Mountains were swaddled in thick fog, and long stretches of the steeply humped and tightly curled interstate were narrowed by roadwork, hemmed in tight by jersey barriers festooned with reflectors. Virtually all the other vehicles we saw were 18-wheelers, either filling the rearview mirror with their highbeams or roaring by in the other direction, inches from the yellow dividing line that the roadwork barriers pressed our silly little Toyota Celica against. The experience of those trucks—the sound, the way their headlights lit up the fog and for several long seconds left us truly incapable of seeing the road or anything else, the jarring slap of the wind as they passed, which always buffeted our overmatched little car like it was a cheap plastic kite—was terrifying. They were like monsters.
It felt acutely dangerous, and stupid—and endless, without any visual cues to tell us we'd actually gone anywhere, just hour after hour of fog-smeared blackness occasionally and abruptly rendered a blinding white by some mountainous truck's highbeam headlights roughly at the level of our eyes. The thousands of reflectors, on the jersey wall and along the yellow centerline of the road and on the corners of the trucks' huge trailers, began to feel like needles stabbing into the soft stuff behind my eyes. But we couldn't think of what else to do except to keep going, keeping each other company by continually playacting confrontations that invariably ended with one character or the other wrenching the steering wheel into oncoming traffic in an act of kamikaze vengeance. We didn't even have the last-resort option of pulling over to the roadside and waiting for morning, because the highway had no shoulder whatsoever. There were not even nine inches of roadside to pull over into. It felt like Purgatory.
By the time we finally parked in front of my mom's house, in the soft blue early hours of morning, my eyeballs had long since passed through pain and exhaustion to a strange new state more distressing than either. They felt overlarge, and my eyelids seemed stretched taut around them; they were throbbing; most alarming, they weren't responding—adjusting to light, focusing on things—the way that, as a lifelong eyeball-haver, one tends to take for granted. I shambled to bed and slept for a long time, avoided driving for a couple days, and discovered over the following weeks and months that my night vision had not recovered. It never fully did.
That was the first beachhead lost to the long slow decline of my eyesight. Over the past couple years I've had the very common middle-aged experience of discovering that the range at which I could comfortably read text had narrowed drastically without my noticing: Where for the first 40-some years of my life I could rely on my eyeballs to do the adjusting so I could read the small text on anything I was holding, now I'd begun doing the unconscious and goofy neck dance characteristic of aging doofuses who need to put their glasses on, to get my eyes and the object the exact right distance from each other.
At a certain point I noticed (I'm slow to notice stuff) that I'd been feeling motion-sick and headachey for a few days in a row. I get bouts of vertigo at the changing of seasons and always have, so I didn't think much of it and just pissed and moaned the usual amount. Eventually my wife observed that for various reasons I'd done a lot of midday highway driving over that stretch of days, where I usually do none at all, and suggested I get my eyes checked. That is how I wound up, a few months ago and for the first time in my life, with both prescription eyeglasses for seeing things at a distance and reading glasses for, well, reading.
Here is the thing. I have the executive functioning and cognitive flexibility of your average ball of socks. I slip very easily into unintentional habits and am just about disabled by my incapacity for forming intentional ones; conversely, I struggle very hard to break unintentional habits and shrug off the effort to form intentional ones as easily and thoughtlessly as you shed skin cells. Moreover I am always losing and/or accidentally destroying things; I play roughly the equivalent role in the orderliness and organization of my own home and life that an F-5 tornado plays in a Missouri exurb.
Now I had gone from having zero pairs of eyeglasses to having frickin' two of them, for different situations. No points for guessing that within two weeks I'd permanently misplaced one and unwittingly allowed my crazy dog to entertain herself by chewing on the other. A further zero points for guessing that it took me weeks to replace either of them.
How do people do this? I have no real need for the prescription glasses when I am doing the things I do the most of—reading, writing, removing things from my dog's mouth—in an average day. Moreover, when I unthinkingly try to read anything with them on, and I am constantly fucking reading things, I get vertigo pretty much instantaneously. But! I do need them for easing the strain on my eyes when, like, idly looking at something across a room, or driving a car, or just kind of existing in a world in which many things, it turns out, occupy space farther away than 18 inches from my face.
Meanwhile I do need the reading glasses for reading and writing, and they make me incapable of looking at literally anything else without getting, you guessed it, vertigo. My doctor warned me against multifocal lenses because they can cause, say it with me, vertigo.
This is impossible. Cold fusion will be accomplished more easily than me figuring out how to manage this.
Here is what the average minute of my day looks like now. I am working on my laptop, wearing my reading glasses. Because I possess all the attentional control of a housefly, after 30 seconds I will unthinkingly look at literally anything else other than my laptop screen, and reel and get dizzy and go "Gah, fuck," and take my reading glasses off. Four seconds later it will be time for me to put them back on again. Am I supposed to have put my prescription glasses on in the interim? So that I could idly gaze at some random thing for a few seconds due to having exhausted my feeble attention span with half a minute of work?
My two pairs of glasses are like windblown feathers in my life. Sometimes they are nearby and other times they are not, and that is not up to me either way. I encounter them like a friend you didn't expect to bump into at the grocery store. Hey! It's great to see you! Please stand at this precise distance so that I can look at you without turning green, breaking out in a cold sweat, and falling over.
Some people were not meant to have eyeballs, and should never have been entrusted with them in the first place. Liberate tutemet ex inferis.
