The Quarterly Grain Report

Driving a car is not usually a challenge. After the novelty of learning the basics eventually wears off, adjustments must be made to keep the activity from becoming tiresome. After all, a tired driver is an unsafe driver. So, the rule that I usually go by, is that the car should always be traveling at such a rate of speed that routine driving is transformed into a challenge. This rule is not for the faint of heart, nor the faint of stomach for that matter. As the saying goes, if you want to make an omelet, you're gonna have to paralyze a few people. However, on a recent Thursday morning, no additional velocity or hallucinogens were needed to create a most difficult highway situation.

I awoke at 5:34 to prepare for work, and initially all appeared to be normal, except for one tiny thing. A sharp pain in my now completely reddened right eye. I remembered catching a spark or something in it at the spark factory the day before, but it didn't seem serious. No blood spurted from the area, and I didn't sprawl on the ground screaming and clutching it. But later in the evening it did feel irritated, so logically, I rubbed and poked at it. (It would be revealed to me at a later time that this probably did more harm than good.) I thought that the problem might just take care of itself over the course of the workday, but I wasn't quite able to bear the discomfort the entire time, and I left six hours early. At this stage, the only place I was able to look without a stinging sensation was the bottom right corner of my eye. I had determined through much trial and error that I could pan left, but had to pan back to the right in order to blink. Looking straight ahead was okay in small doses, but I could not look directly up or down. Needless to say, I had to give away my sixty-dollar tickets to the planetarium and IMAX theater for that night. The drive home consisted of a hand over my right eye, and my head turned forty-five degrees to the left and slightly upward.

Halfway home, I was forced to stop at a gas station to fill up. I put on my sunglasses and was bent on not seeming weird to the cashier. I couldn't very well tilt my head back and to the side to look at her, but I couldn't look straight ahead either. So I didn't look in her direction at all. And with help from the sunglasses, all went according to plan. I simply lowered my head when I was supposed to be looking at my wallet, and raised it when I would have been looking at the woman and handing her some currency. I handed her a twenty, kept my head forward, and when she said something like "Can you believe this gas?" I just nodded and laughed, as if to say "Yes. I know what you mean. I too cannot believe this gas." I held out my hand for the change, and with the exception of a few fallen pennies, the transaction was painless. I got home, and thought that now it might be a good idea to get a second opinion on this eye problem. I didn't want to turn into Dennis Hopper from Waterworld, even if I did have a massive, chainsmoking, jet-ski army at my disposal, so I made my way down to the clinic.

I was escorted from the waiting area into a little room with a table wrapped in deli paper, and inspirational posters on the wall. The ones that have pictures of whales or hang-gliders with inspirational words like DETERMINATION beneath them, and then some dynamic slogan like, If you have the drive to succeed, you can soar to unknown heights. No doubt the purpose of these posters is to comfort the patient, because if the doc comes back with your test results, and it looks like you might have lethal, Asian Monkeypox, the determination of the hang-glider or the young bear who has just caught his first salmon will surely soften the blow. Anyhow, here I was in this room, listening to the nurse run down her series of questions about the history of the injury. These very same questions would be repeated by the doctor after he came in and looked at what the nurse had just written down. ("So, you hurt your eye, huh?") Once this procedure was over, the doc left the room and came back with a Rubbermaid bin labeled on the side in permanent marker: EYE KIT. This made me wonder whether a surgeon would enter the OR with a tub labeled TORSO KIT if I needed open-heart surgery. The doc examined my eye and sent me on my way with an eye patch (not a sweet, pirate-looking one, just gauze and tape), and the knowledge that my mild scratch would heal within forty-eight hours.

The whole experience left me with a new-found sense of respect for those who must function with limited vision in society, particularly the Cyclops that inhabits the Alaskan island of Agattu. You are truly a hero, Bolthorn.