When I sat up in bed this morning, I saw something on the floor against the rug that looked like a cellophane wrapper of some sort. It looked rectangular, a little bit like the top part of a cigarette pack wrapper, perhaps. But, I knew it wasn’t, because I don’t smoke.
I stretched my leg out and touched it with my toe. It was one of the lenses to my glasses.
Uh, this would explain why my right eye was blurry all last night. The right lens to my glasses was totally missing from the frame!
This is how it all went down: When I lied down to take my nap last night, I fell asleep with my glasses on my stomach.
When I got up after the hour-long nap, I stepped on them, as they had fallen on the floor when I was asleep. I heard a loud pop, and thought, “Oh shit, I’ve snapped an ear stem off.”
I looked at them, and one of the ear stems was sticking way out to the side, and I thought, “Oh, it just bent,” while I molded it back in place.
I had no idea the popping noise was really the right lens popping out, and after fixing the ear stem, just went on my merry, cyclopsical way.
The only thing more dorky than walking around with tape on the nose bridge of your glasses is walking around with one lens totally missing. Thank goodness it was dark out, and that I didn’t wear them into the bar to dance.
I stopped by my eye doctor’s on the way into work today, and said to the optician, “Can you pop this lens back in?”
She said, “What happened?”
“I stepped on them,” I said.
She asked back, “Why’d you do that?”
“Cause I was mad at ’em!” I thought.
Today I received some SPAM from “The Enlargement Team” with the subject line of “A very special enlargement.” Evidently I need so much help that they’ve put a team in place to help me out.
Will, one of my “regular” readers (hey, the subliminal Metamucil must be working), posted a comment on my Sadlack’s Heroes story of last November, which somehow got me to thinking about being published.
That thought led me to think about The Urban Hiker, a magazine in which I was published in June of 2004, with this story: “My Detainment.”
I’m going to see if they might be interested in publishing, “Another Time, Another Place.”
A quick look at their website screams, “This might no longer be a viable enterprise,” and now that I think about it, I haven’t seen The Urban Hiker on any distribution stands lately. 
I’ll have to check it out.
We picked up Robert’s car tonight, and then ate at the Chargrill on Hillsborough Street, using a coupon from:
At the pick-up window, Robert said to me, “Ask them for a straw,” and an old man with tainted teeth waiting for his order behind us, said, “It’s in the bag. I know the routine here. At least that’s what we used to do with them 40 years ago when I worked here.”
Sure enough, it was in the bag.
I took a 2-hour nap, and Robert a 1-hour one. He read during my first hour. I put my glasses on the end table near my bed.
Our intent was to get up at 10:30, and head to Flex for Trailer Park Prize Night.
The reality was that at the hour of the alarm going off, staying home was more attractive than milling about in a basement ashtray in the midst of a throng of people, and then coming home smelling like a cigarette’s butt.
We stayed in.