“Everyone knows that getting old is a ladder of insults of ascending severity. I’m kind of surprised that body parts don’t just fall off in the night… or evaporate or something.

Anyway, like some of you, I am getting old. I’m actually vastly older than my expected expiration date, which was somewhere in my 30’s. As kids, we realized that adults were insane, and we made pacts that if any of us lived to be 35, the others would hunt us down and take us out… to ensure we didn’t repeat the nonsense we saw our parents partaking in. Of course, that would leave at least one of us in a pickle, so to speak.

Our plans weren’t perfect, but they were based on the world we knew at the time, which, to us, seemed crystal-clear.

In any case, my eyesight is failing. Some of you may have experienced this. Things that were once visually pristine, are now blurry, and it isn’t improving with time.

I was at my bank a few months ago — well, I mean, my account there has about $12 in it, which is a high balance for me — so I guess it’s more like my piggy bank, than an actual bank.

I noticed that they were giving away free reading glasses, so I grabbed a pair. I mean, try to imagine the interest on $12. A pair of reading glasses is probably worth 100 times that, so, for me, it was a good day.

Unlike many of you, I pretty much only read books on actual paper. I’m a dinosaur par excellence when it comes to most aspects of modernity. So these glasses really made a difference in my life. They work, essentially, like magnifying glasses do. The close-up stuff that would otherwise be blurry, is now crystal clear, and the far-away stuff is blurry. This reminds me of time and expectation, somehow…

But I realized the first drawback when I was reading at a restaurant. Look, there are some things you really do not want magnified in crystal, HDTV clarity — and one of those is food. You definitely do not want to see all the tiny little details of your meal. Ever.

There are a few other things that share this quality. I mean, let’s face it, a lot of us read in bed. I think you can see where this is going, so I’ll leave the rest to your imagination, which, I am hoping, is blurry enough that it doesn’t terrify you the way it did me when I discovered the second thing I didn’t want magnified.”

— Bobby Yingo at the Grey Room