Ode to Velma

Sunglasses at Night - Corey Hart (mp3)
Chains - Gatekeeper (mp3

Let’s just be clear. “Sunglasses at Night” is a stupid song.

If you want to go following your ex-girlfriend under cover of darkness, you don’t wear sunglasses. That’s a shitty disguise. You know why? Because it makes following your ex-girlfriend harder. Not to mention that, if your ex-girlfriend ever paid any attention to you at all, she is probably capable of recognizing you in a pair of friggin’ sunglasses.

I need to rewrite the song.

I wear my sunglasses at night
So I can so I can
See the people on the TV set

I wear sunglasses at night
So I can so I can
Keep track of stop signs on the street
 
Well, she looks blurry to me
She taps my insecurity
Is she holding a drink or a key?
I turn to her and say,

“I can’t read a damn thing without these oh no.
It’s real dark but at least I can see, oh no.
I can’t believe that
You think I’d wear these things by choice, oh no.
I lied and said they were broken Transitions oh no.”

Today marks two weeks without glasses. I wore them into the ocean. The ocean punished me, as it should have.

My two options, in the absence of my beloved glasses, have been simple: Velma or Corey Hart. I can either walk around whiny and say shit like “My glasses! My glasses! I can’t see anything without my glasses!” Or I can experience all things after dusk with several degrees less of light information than my fellow sight-enabled humans.

When driving down a dark road after midnight while wearing sunglasses, one can’t help but get philosophical.

Several times I’ve thought of the scene when Obi-Wan Kenobi is training Luke while they’re on the Millennium Falcon, and the wise geezer drops the blast shields down on Luke’s helmet.

“But... with the blast shields down, I can’t even see! How am I supposed to fight (or, in my case, drive).” And I hear Obi-Wan tell me that I shouldn’t trust my eyes because they can deceive me. That I must drive by stretching out my feelings.

And suddenly, I’m in my driveway! I’m safe and home! The Force is strong with this one.

Naturally, it’s a perfect time in my life to realize how much I take for granted. Little lenses in metal frames, capable of altering completely the way I view and interact with the world around me.Yet I’ve also been taking them off and going at it with blurry vision. And I’m constantly thinking of the great artists whose works altered as they went blind, yet often their impaired vision rendered their creations all the more unique and personal.

When you see the Monet’s Water Lillies, you see what his brain processed, how light actually entered and worked in his dying eyes.(Most things I’ve read believe his eyesight was quite healthy when he painted the Rouen Cathedral, which looks just as beautifully smudged and blurry as the water lillies, so I probably give his poor eyesight too much credit and his amazing talents too little.)

Seeing the world blurry is so... analog!!

We live in such a digital, high definition world, and I fetishize that existence as much as most anyone I know. But, once in a while, seeing the world the way nature intended me to see it at this stage in my life... it’s one more reminder of our technological marvels, but it’s also a reminder that sometimes seeing things unclearly creates its own beauty.

Blurred can be beautiful. Briefly.