"Dave Barry’s Greatest Hits" - читать интересную книгу автора (Barry Dave)

Randomly Amongst The Blobs

Without my eyeglasses, I have a great deal of trouble distinguishing between house fires and beer signs. I wear the kind of glasses that they never show in those eyeglasses advertisements where the lenses are obviously fake because they don’t distort the attractive model’s face at all. My lenses make the entire middle of my head appear smaller. When professional photographers take my picture, they always suggest that I take my glasses off, because otherwise the picture shows this head with the normal top and bottom, but in the middle there’s this little perfect miniature human head, maybe the size of an orange, staring out from behind my glasses.

People like photographers and dentists and barbers are always asking me to take my glasses off, and I hate it because it makes me stupid and paranoid. I worry that the dentist and his aides are creeping up on me with acetylene torches, or have sneaked out of the room and left me chatting away at the dental spittoon. So I use a sonar technique originally developed by bats, wherein I fire off a constant stream of idiot conversational remarks designed to draw replies so I can keep track of which blobs in the room represent people. This makes it very hard to work on my teeth.

Swimming at the beach is the worst. If I go into the ocean with my glasses off, which is the traditional way to go into the ocean, I cannot frolic in the surf like a normal person because (a) I usually can’t see the waves until they knock me over and drag me along the bottom and fill my mouth with sand, and (b) the current always carries me down the beach, away from my wife and towel and glasses. When I emerge from the water, all I can see is this enormous white blur (the beach?) covered with darkish blobs (people?), and I run the risk of plopping down next to a blob that I think is my wife and throwing my arm over it in an affectionate manner, only to discover that it is actually horseshoe crabs mating, or a girlfriend of an enormous violent, jealous weightlifter, or, God help me, the violent weightlifter himself.

So what I do in these circumstances is wander randomly amongst the blobs, making quiet semidesperate noises designed not to bother any civilians, yet to draw the attention of whatever blob might be my wife. “Well, here I am!” I say, trying to appear as casual as possible. “Yes, here I am! Dave Barry! Ha ha! Help!” And so forth. I’m not sure I’m all that unobtrusive on account of my mouth is full of sand.

Mostly these days when I go to the beach I just stay out of the water altogether. I sit on the shore and play cretin, sand-digging games with my three-year-old son, and I watch the lifeguards, who sit way up on the beach with their 20-20 vision and blow their whistles at swimmers I couldn’t see even with the aid of a radio telescope, off the coast of France somewhere.

At least I no longer have to worry about necking on dates, the way I did in high school. That was awful. See, you have to take your glasses off when you neck, lest you cause facial injury to the other necker. So I’d be sitting on the sofa with a girl, watching a late movie on television, and I’d figure the time was right, and I’d very casually remove my glasses, rendering myself batlike, and lean toward the blob representing the girl and plant a sensuous kiss on the side of her head owing to the fact that she was still watching the movie. Now what? Do I try again, on the theory that she has been aroused by being kissed on the side of the head? Or is she angry? Is she still watching television? Is she still on the sofa?

There was no way to tell. The world was a blur. So I’d have to very casually grope around for my glasses and put them back on for a little reconnaissance, but by the time I found them likely as not the potential co-necker had fallen asleep.

I suppose I could wear contact lenses, but people who wear contact lenses are always weeping and blinking, and their eyes turn red, as though their mothers had just died. You want to go up to them on the street and say “There, there,” and maybe give them money. Also, you never hear of anybody who wears them successfully for more than maybe three weeks. People are always saying, “I really liked them, but my hair started to fall out,” or, “I had this girlfriend, Denise, and one of her contacts slid up under her eyelid and went into her bloodstream and got stuck in her brain and now she never finishes her sentences.”

I guess I should be grateful that I can see at all, and I am. I just felt like wallowing in self-pity for a while, is all. I promise I won’t do it again. Those of you with worse afflictions than mine, such as migraine headaches or pregnancy, are welcome to write me long, descriptive letters. I promise to look them over, although not necessarily with my glasses on.