THE MUTANT CONTACT LENS FROM HELL

There's a slightly new different version of me nowadays.

You see, I used to wear glasses until very recently. I'm now trying out these cool water-based contact lenses and I'm actually feeling terrific with them. They give you the illusion that there's nothing wrong with your eyes, your natural face comes back to you and, above all, (this was obviously my primal motivation) you can once again make fun of people who do have glasses.

All is well, except for a minuscule… minor detail… nothing really… you can almost just pretend it isn't there. Yet, I must confess that I felt a bit challenged by the fact that it was pure hell to put them on. At this time, I only had to do it once. These specific lenses are the cool modern type you can sleep with for days (I call them "promiscuous lenses").

This morning, however, immediately after realizing that the expiration date on them was almost over (they're turning green and smelly), I took it like a man (a very coward man) and got into a panic state that made me run in circles for a few hours (screaming a few selected vowels) until I was lucky enough to slip on the kitchen carpet and hit my head against the fridge. It made me think. Life is fleeting and I hated that carpet. It was ugly, had stains on it that could make a grown man burst into tears and the day after I bought it, they lowered the price more than half.

While still on the floor and lacking the ability to move, my concussion further made me remember how, after I was miraculously able to get the first lens to finally stick to my right eye, I lost the second one and had to be on all fours looking for the damn thing with only one eye. Twenty minutes later, when it was no longer funny to pretend I was a one-eyed pirate, I eventually gave up and initiated the process of figuring out how to take it off (which I'm yet to find out). And there it was, that slimy blue bastard looking at me, laughing and making faces, glued to the mirror of the bathroom wall.

An hour later, after what can only be described as the single most traumatic experience of my past hour, I had won the "War on Lens" only to find out (nearly five minutes later) that I had somehow managed to put both lenses on the same eye and that indeed I wasn't even capable of seeing well enough to cross the bathroom door (and had been in fact bumping repeatedly into the sidewall that whole time). A disturbing episode I will most certainly recall an unhealthy number of times in my old age and perhaps also following that.

After cleaning some of the drops of blood from the wall (and throwing the carpet away) I immediately perceived this whole event as so daunting that I just had to write a few lines telling the entire world about it (and a few random strangers on the street therefore saving myself from the claws of professional therapy). The volumes that compose the trilogy on this painful subject should be out in less than two years.

I am currently looking for support groups in order to share my pain and thus help me surpass this horrible experience.

I am very confident I can defeat this.

I wonder, though, if taking them out will be any easier…