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.

FROM THE ARCHIVES: The Trouble I Seen

The following was originally posted on February 19, 2009.


Fall on Tears - Love Spit Love
King of Pain (live) - Alanis Morrissette

Random things I've recently witnessed and can't shake:

A spider was spinning its web between two of my office chairs the other morning during a meeting. A co-worker bent down, pulled the spider up by its thread, and dangled it for everyone to see. Then he took that spider, placed it in a corner, and let it crawl away. I would have just stepped on it. My choice would likely have gone unchallenged, and no one would have been too upset with me. Just a damn spider, after all. But my co-worker's actions inspired us all to pause and consider what he'd just done. Mercy is a quiet but powerful force.

A bulldozer spent the weekend leveling an area across the street from us. It would scoop up dirt, drive up the hill, and dump it onto a mud pile. Several times it scooped up some plastic tarp that had been laid out. At one point, the dozer dumped out the dirt, but the tarp wouldn't come off. It had just barely wrapped itself around one of the teeth, and most of it was dangling on the earth pile. The dozer's driver was shaking that blade up and down, back and forth, but the tarp wouldn't come off. At some point, I expected him to step down and pull it off with his hands, but he never did. He just kept jostling that blade for several minutes. Finally, he backed up and then drove the blade right into the dirt mount with speed that suggested tremendous frustration. When he backed up a second time, the tarp was gone, buried underneath the pile. Even with our biggest and strongest technologies, we still get caught up on tiny distractions.

A squirrel failed to properly latch on during what looked to be a routine tree-to-tree jump outside our house. It fell some 30 feet, thudding onto our back yard. It stopped for only a second, perhaps to catch its breath or make sure all its body parts were in tact, before running like hell back up the same tree out of which it had just fallen. Even squirrels must believe the devil you know is better than the devil you don't.

At the casino last week, I entered the restroom to attend to personal matters only to open a stall door and see a large pile of pudding-esque shit on the tiles two feet before the toilet. As my eyes scrolled up to the toilet, I saw that the guilty party had removed his underwear and simply dropped that soiled item into the water. Some elderly man must have held on a few seconds too long, perhaps for one extra spin on the slots, and failed to make it in time. He chose to go commando rather than try and find some other way out of that bathroom with any of his dignity in tact. Acceptable loss. Collateral damage unavoidable.

On our drive home, on the side of Alabama Highway 27, a mangy dog gave one last try at standing up. It had been hit, and fairly recently. Although there was no blood, the back half of its body had clearly been crushed by the impact. None of us had a way of putting it down, and it would never have made it to a vet, so we kept driving. I looked back to see the tan, short-haired dog -- must've been part Boxer, maybe part Lab -- merely lay down on its side and put its face down onto the cold gravel. I kept staring back at him until we went over a hill, but he never moved again. Watching a creature suffer prior to an inevitable death is always more agonizing than seeing it already dead, even if we have no control over either situation and exist only to serve as a witness. Yet, if given the choice, we would always want to be with our loved ones in their final moments.

Driving the four blocks from home to work and going slowly over a speed hump, I passed a Barbie doll, completely undressed, sprawled out on the curbside, inches from the road. Her hair was tangled and wild. One of her shoes had fallen into the road. Otherwise no clothes were around. The life of a homicide detective must be like placing your heart in battery acid.

"Fall on Tears," one of my favorite songs from the '90s, is from Trysome Eatone. Alanis' version of "King of Pain," which is certainly not as good as the original but not at all bad, is from her MTV Unplugged album. Both can be found on iTunes or Amazon.com's mp3 site.

A Manifesto of Sorts

Blurred vision. I've always been intrigued by it. Those times when you have to squint a bit to see what's really going on, when you have to stare extra hard at the outline of something to try to figure it out, when the shapes are so amorphous, you can only guess. Sometimes I like to drive without my glasses. Sometimes I like to lie awake in the morning in winter and stare at the mesh of tree branches outside the window and watch those branches define different kinds of faces, no matter where I look. A century ago, there were people who never saw a clear sight their entire lives; if my Amero-centric vision weren't so blurred, I'd probably realize that it's still true today in many parts of the world.

Blurred vision requires an imagination to fill in the rest. And so the title of this blog.

It's not about drinking; it's about optimism. Even stupid, silly, no-justification-for-it optimism. There is (or was) a great bluegrass band called The Seldom Scene and when I saw them once in Pittsburgh, they covered this song:

"Well the hard times we've had
Don't look so bad
Through the bottom of the glass."

Hey, the statement is still true if you're only drinking water. It's easy optimism, perhaps made easier and then harder with some alcohol. But so what? Shouldn't optimism be easy? Shouldn't hope? Shouldn't faith? I'm mean, you don't say, "Hey, I'm working really hard on my faith today. And after my workout, I'm going to devote a couple of hours to hoping." You either got it or you don't. Me, I got it.

So, I like to look at life and I like to look at it in an optimistic context. I find Cormac McCarthy's The Road hopeful. The Cure makes me smile and even laugh. A bad meal makes me think about how it could have been better. And sex? Do I even need to explain why sex is hope? Even the poor sap from the Seldom Scene song gets it, though his lover has left him:

Well I found a new someone you may say she's trash
Well she ain't much to see
But she looks good to me
Through the bottom of the glass.

I know it sounds like a sleazy, drunken bar pick-up, but it's funnier than it is sad because of the guy's self-awareness of his decision and because in the middle of his misery, he's found a way to win. Maybe not the best way, but hey.

Odd thing, though. If you've ever really looked through the bottom of one of those glasses, you can't see much of anything at all.

Still, a toast, not to what was, but to what can be or even to what could have been.

Welcome.