Peril-Sensitive Contact Lenses

I’ve had bad eyesight ever since I was a little tike. My first glasses were clunky, embarrassing things, always filthy and bent out of shape, and I wore them only when I absolutely had to. Sometime in the middle of high school, my optometrist introduced me to contacts, and I’ve never looked back.

Lately, though, my eyes have become inexplicably hostile towards these friendly, helpful little lenses, which have served me faithfully for so many years. They seem to be rejecting them. I fear that the era of contacts may be coming to an end for me.

That would be bad. I need my contacts. Why? Because, usually, my mornings go like this:

• I wake up, open my eyes, peer out at a hazy, indistinct world. Close my eyes. Go back to sleep.

• Some time later, my alarm starts beeping. I reach over and pummel every blurry alarm-clock-shaped object in reach until it stops. Go back to sleep.

• My dog wakes up, shakes himself thoroughly, comes out of his cage, turns on his back and shimmies along the floor for a couple of minutes, stretches, yawns hugely, shakes again, and then puts his paws up on the bed and presses his gargantuan snout up against my face. He whines until I wake up enough to let loose a stream of unspeakable obscenities. This does not discourage him in any way. Eventually, I open my eyes. Because of his proximity (he likes to get up very close), and his tenacity, he is often the first thing I see clearly in the morning.

• Finally, I roll groaning out of bed and move toward the bathroom, and stand under a tall lamp until I realize that it is not, in fact, a shower.

• I bump my way along a series of grey fuzzy shapes until I reach a brighter place with no carpeting. Fumble into the shower. Turn on the water. Stand under the water. Turn off the water, feel along the perimeter on the stall until I find a handle, slide it sideways, step out into the bright place again.

• I put in my contacts. The world comes into focus.

In the past, this sudden miracle of near-perfect vision has lasted until the end of the day, when I removed my contacts and crawled into bed. No longer. Now, at around 3:00, while I’m at work, the vision in my right eye becomes somewhat blurry. It is followed, in short order, by the vision in my left eye. And, as my contacts become portals of almost pure opacity, the characters on my screen grow blurry and indistinct, and eventually munge together into a field of muddy, particulate light. At this point, I have to stop working, and go into the bathroom, take my contacts out, hydrate them, and put them in again. This improves the situation for a while. But everything soon gets blurry again.

I’m about to try a new pair of extra-moist contacts, made for ornery eyes like mine. I have high hopes. But I also have a theory.

The adventure game version of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, by Infocom, came with a wonderful device called peril-sensitive sunglasses. These glasses reacted to the approach of danger by turning completely black, thereby shielding their wearers from the unpleasantness of seeing the horrible, terrible thing that was coming their way. (Later on in the game, you come across the Bugblatter Beast of Traal, one of the most fearsome, most vicious, most stupid creatures in the galaxy. You get around him by draping a towel over your head, so that you can’t see him anymore; and, since you can’t see him, the beast, in its extreme stupidity, assumes that it must not be able to see you either. And so it stops seeing you, and you make good your escape. That’s why Douglas Adams was a genius. But I digress.)

So maybe that’s what these contacts are: peril-sensitive. Maybe, at around 3:00 in the afternoon, on a workday, something terrible is about to happen, and it would be better if I didn’t see it. The question is … what? Is my computer going to crash, sucking away with it a day’s worth of work? Am I about to realize that my carefully crafted code is, in fact, a poorly-designed mound of doody-crap? Will I detect an infinite loop, and, in a freak moment of brain-computer synthesis, find myself caught in my own endless cycle, forever doing the same stuff, over and over again, with no memory of having done it before?

I don’t know. The contacts don’t speak. They just obscure.

Stupid peril-sensitive contacts.