I am blogless. So i'll leave this here.

alfa beta

It's something I wrote yesterday for a bit of fun. I'll paste it here and leave you to have a read through it if you like. I'm not really looking for comments or anything. It's just that I may as well do something with the random bits and pieces I scribble. And no better place than boards to do just that.

It's called Keratoconus.

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Keratoconus

I see things differently to you. I have no doubt about that.

Don’t get me wrong now. I’m not talking about my understanding of the world being in any way more profound than yours. I’m not inferring that my perception is somehow enhanced by a deeper and more fulfilling interpretation of reality than you can claim. Not at all. Because, in all likelihood, it probably isn’t. I’m quite a shallow person you see. Shallow by choice, if not exactly by nature. Shallow, because it suits me to be. Shallow because I like it that way.

I did once regard myself as philosophical. But then I studied philosophy and that was the end of that. I sat in halls and classrooms and listened to rotund old men hypothesize about existentialism and postulate endlessly on the essence of epistemology - amongst other things of course. But it was all, as J.P. Sartre might have put it in one of his more lucid moments, a load of merde as far as I was concerned.

I read books about the subject I hardly understood. Then I read their accompanying study guides, which, needless to say, I hardly understood. Curiously, I wrote essays and exam papers which, upon reading back over them, I hardly understood. And yet those same essays and papers received relatively high marks. That I simply didn’t understand at all.

After a while I gave up trying to understand. I figured complete bafflement with regard to the way we relate to the world around us constitutes the most fulfilling way of getting on with reality. To stare in wondrous – and completely shallow - amazement at a starry sky is a far more intoxicating thing to do than to philosophize about how one person’s starry sky compares to another’s, or whether any starry sky exists outside a body’s ability to perceive it, and so on and so on.

The main problem with philosophy, as I see it now, is that there are no answers. Just opinions. And for me a subject of study with no answers is a little like a journey with no destination. You might well enjoy the ride but in the end you get nowhere.

Now don’t get me wrong. Studying philosophy did teach me one thing. It taught me to be grateful for the socialist policies advanced by the politicians of the 1980’s – policies which meant my college fees were covered by the combined goodwill of the country’s tax payers. Because had they not been, I would to this day feel quite cheated by having had to fork out my own money for an education which left me with little more than a confused notion of what Occam’s razor actually entails and an ongoing inability to drop the word ‘hermeneutics’ into a sentence without sounding like a complete prat.

Now you’re probably starting to see what I mean about being shallow.

While I think of it, here’s another example. I had some Jehovah’s Witnesses call to the door recently. They asked me if I ever thought about all the suffering in the world and if I ever wondered whether there was a god or not and if I had questions about things like life after death. Very philosophical, you might say.

I said ‘No.’ Then I said ‘You know what… I used to… But now I don’t and it’s far better’.

I told them they ought to try my way of thinking too and then they wouldn’t have to go pestering people in their homes. It would make life much easier for them in fact. At that point I closed the door quite suddenly and watched them walk away. There were two of the them, a man and a woman. The woman was rather attractive, which for some reason I thought was quite a shame.

Sorry, time to pull in the reins now. I realise I’m veering off course. I’m already dicing with some ludicrously tempting tangents when I should be sticking to the solid sphere of my understanding. And to the story I’m supposed to be telling you. Which, of course, isn’t a story at all, more a sharing of experience. But let’s get back on track in any case.

Okay then, as I said earlier, I see things differently to you.

Purely physically now you understand.

And the reason is quite simple. My eyes are the victims of a relatively rare condition called keratoconus. Which means, rather than their being perfectly and beautifully rounded like a pair of tautly inflated footballs, they are a little more, let’s say, conical…think rugby balls instead of footballs and you’ll be on the right track. Now think of the point in a rugby ball, the sharp bit at each end that causes it to bounce so erratically when a panicking defender tries to second guess its movement prior to pouncing on it - before five opposing forwards do the same to him. Yes that point. Now place that point over the pupil in the eye and you’ve got a fair idea of what’s going on with my vision. In a nutshell: pointy eyes. (That was longwinded, wasn’t it. Sorry.)

So what does that actually mean for me? It means a lack of focus. A lack of vision. A great deal of distortion. And a level of confidence bordering on complete self-delusion when it comes to driving at night time. Apologies in advance to other road users. I may not see you. I have insurance. That is all I have to say on the subject.

Anyway, this condition was diagnosed twenty years ago at a time when I found myself living in England and consequently the guest of what that country’s natives refer to as the NHS. And what a wonderful S it was. A huge, uber-comprehensive, nationwide, classless S designed to keep the health of sixty million people on track and in shape. The S told me what I had. Keratoconus. But then, through the mouth of an overweight, grumpy and decidedly abrupt specialist, it also told me there was sod all I could do about it except to prepare for the possibility of going blind sometime down the line.

Hurrah. Top Ho. I whistled with delight, before shearing down my clinkwhittles and dancing off into the Somerset countryside like one of Jane Austin’s gramophone-wielding, lesbian gibbons.

Was I happy with that diagnosis? No. I was about as happy with it as I am now with the paragraph preceding this one. It made no sense. None whatsoever.

I, of eyes that sparkled with intelligence, wit, charm and candour, could not possibly be one to succumb to the sheer annoyance of a physical disability in their regard. Something had to be wrong. My perfection in ways physical was a given. It was something I had grown used to. Something I took for granted. And yet, here was an expert, all be it an obese and dowdily dressed expert, telling me that my eyes were quite simply the wrong shape. The audacity of the person. The sheer audacity.

Anyway, lenses were tried and tested and prescribed and ordered and worn. The first thing I noticed when they were put in place was that they gave me double vision. In each eye. Curious as it may seem, this was true. I had quadruple vision when wearing both. Which to be honest meant I never had so many friends, nor so much trouble crossing the street. I wore them for a few days before giving up on them. I could see enough without them to read, to drive, to walk around and recognise most people at a sort of a glance. In other words, I could live without them.

And that’s what I did.

For twenty years I lived and worked with my pointy eyes - staring regularly at computer screens and occasionally at designers’ disbelieving faces (whenever I told them what the client wanted) or at clients’ disbelieving faces (whenever I told them how much it would cost) or at my wife’s disbelieving face (whenever I told her what time I’d be home) or at my own disbelieving face (for whatever reason).

There was a lot of disbelief in my life.

Twenty years of squinting slightly. Twenty years of saying ‘what does that say?’ to whoever was next to me. Twenty years of wishing the couch was just a bit closer to the telly. Twenty years of telling people ‘no, I don’t wear glasses’ and about twelve years of shaking my head and replying, ‘it’s got nothing to do with Kerry Katona.’

Then when I was forty, and planning the perfect mid-life crisis by flicking through the ‘performance cars’ section of Autotrader, I noticed something. I noticed a haziness in my vision that I hadn’t noticed before. I noticed it when purveying the exquisite sea-view from my expensively built detached country home on the south coast. Yes, it was true, I’d married well.

I knew something had changed, something in the odd balance that my odd eyes had grown used to over the years had suddenly altered and I needed to get this alteration checked out. When I proceeded to the checkout, it seemed that the condition diagnosed twenty years beforehand had just recently decided to deteriorate. But as luck would have it, I was now not destined to go blind as per the billing of my NHS friend two decades earlier. No, technology had overtaken my condition while it had lain dormant in my peepers. What jolly fortune.

Cross Linking. That’s what was prescribed. Don’t ask me. All it meant was that I had to stare at a light for thirty minutes in a clinic full of nurses who were incredibly pleasant and receptionists who could have been models and then spend the next two days trying everything I could to put out the fire in the right side of my head. It wasn’t too bad actually. Thanks to the anaesthetic drops. And my wife’s earlier insistence that we put blackout blinds in the bedrooms.

The result. One and a half thousand euro less in my bank account. An insurance company insisting there was no such procedure as Cross Linking. And a level of vision in the treated eye that was, well, about the same as it had been before being treated. Okay, not a miracle cure. Sure. But there is no cure, short of cornea transplants. Cross Linking, you see, is designed to prevent further deterioration and, to be honest, if it does what it’s supposed to do that’s more than fine by me.

Anyway, all this is just background. What I really wanted to tell you was, well, let me tell you.

So, there I am one day, after the procedure, sitting in this glass-fronted, bo-concept designed reception area in this clinic, reading the Economist – okay, well, trying to read it by squinting a little and holding it rather closer to my eyes than normal people would – when this woman breezes past and catches my attention. She doesn’t do anything to catch it. She just breezes past. Then she calls someone’s name and they follow her into a little room. And I realise she works in this place. Now the thing is, I am being treated by a man. A pleasant, efficient, charming, kind, informative, clever, handsome man, let it be said. But at the end of the day, a man. Why I wonder could I not have been luckier in the consultant lottery draw and picked the straw that said ‘woman’. And in particular, this woman.

Let me describe her to you. The way I saw her.

As I said, she breezed past. She didn’t walk, or step, or jog, or stroll, or stumble or hop. No she breezed. She moved like a hybrid car does before the petrol engine kicks in. Silently, smoothly and with a dynamic, yet serene, strength that seems utterly at odds with the force required to provide such momentum. I’ve lost you there, haven’t I? Don’t worry, I’ve lost myself too.

She was tall. She was elegant. She was slim. Some would have said thin. But the people who would have said that would have probably been fat. (They would also have been women and they would have been jealous.) She wore high heels, a light, lacy top and slacks. Yes, slacks. There’s a conservatism in her dress that needs expounding and it can only be done so through the use of the right words.

She could have been in the audience of a test match at Lords. Or relaxing over a picnic on a sunny afternoon in the Phoenix Park. She could have been at the afters of a wedding or visiting her god-daughter at her first holy communion. Now you see how she was dressed. Beautifully. Understatedly. Effortlessly. Elegantly. She wore the types of clothes that helped her breeze rather than walk.

But what did she look like? Well. I’m not sure. Remember, I can’t see all that well. So I go by impressions rather than details. But my impressions were good. She had blonde, curly hair, that fell just a little below her shoulders and looked to me as if it had been washed in the crystal springs of an Alpine getaway mere minutes before her arrival into my world. The face it framed was one of gentle, natural beauty, boasting a fresh, radiant complexion and an expression of graceful, intelligent care. Her nose was straight and not diminutive – and to be honest I have a thing for prominent noses, so let’s just leave it at that. And her mouth, well that was pretty and pert with full lips and a smile that sparkled like a southerly view on a summer’s day.

Look, put it this way. She was Austin Clarke’s Sunday in every week. That’ll cover it all. And if you don’t know what I mean, go find a poetry book.

Okay. You get the drift now I hope. I was suddenly and breathlessly and luxuriously infatuated. I just have to make that clear for anyone here who mightn’t have clicked to the fact. If you did click, that’s good. Either it says you’re clever or it says I can write. We’ll settle for a combination of the two and move on to the bit where she comes back out of her office and approaches me.

So. She comes back out of her office and approaches me. And then, low and holy-mary-mother-of-god behold, she says my name. I stand and smile. She smiles and says ‘hi’. Then she says ‘come this way’ and walks back into her little office and I follow obediently. And all I’m thinking is ‘wouldn’t this be great if it was her bedroom!’

Look, she’s wearing a wedding ring and so am I. But you still think these things, you know!

‘Have a seat’ she says and I do. Her voice is soft. It’s as soft as a feather mattress, resting on a fully sprung base, stored on a trampoline. It’s seriously soft. Beautifully soft.

She tells me what she is going to do. She is going to try and improve my recently cross linked vision using different types of newly developed rgp contact lens. I revel in the news as I know it means one thing. Proximity.

And I’m right, she is as close as she can get when she leans forward and places the first lens onto my eye. I am looking straight at her chest because there is nothing else for me to look at. I am imagining what is under the lacy top when she stoops down a little to get a better look at the lens. Then she is staring into my eyes. Staring intently. There is an intimacy about what she is doing that can of course be explained away by her job. But I don’t want it to be.

I blink a few times and try to get used to the sensation of the lens in my eye. I am startled by the clarity it has suddenly brought to my world. Clarity and depth.

She says ‘is that comfortable?’

I nod.

She says ‘How’s the sight?’

I say ‘Amazing.’

She says ‘What do you notice most?’

I say ‘How bad your skin really is and the amount of foundation you’re wearing to cover it up.’

The words are out of my mouth before I realise I’ve said them. They’re like a reflex. A knee being hit with a hammer. I hear them spinning towards her, out of control, unleashed, echoing around the cavernous chasms of her office before hitting her, head on, crashing into her and knocking her gentle and beautiful expression sideways.

I have just said the most unbelievably stupidest thing, like, ever, like.

She doesn’t answer. She probably won’t. I turn red. I feel hot. I notice the pinprick of sweat under each arm. I wonder if I should apologise. Or will that make it worse? In the end I do nothing. I just sit there with a small piece of plastic in my right eye and curse it silently for fooling my voice into acting rashly and without the expressed consent of my brain.

I already know these new lenses will fail. I already know it because I want them to. I just want the skewed, blurry, shallow vision I’m used to back, the one I’ve cultivated and grown to love over the past forty or so years. The one, importantly, I can coordinate my voice with.

I can’t cope with clarity I realise. It makes me see things I don’t want to see. And say things I don’t want to say.

When all is said and done, I’m happier seeing things my way. And I think I always will be.

Gryphonboy

I quite enjoyed that.

Good stuff.