2018

I made a mistake at Rite-Aid. I bought three ESCs instead of three WRWs.

“What are you talking about?”

I could be the last person on earth still wearing hard contact lenses. I know, I know, I should have gotten with the program and had my eyes done, gone under the knife, but the problem there, in addition to possibly less than perfect results, is that if you’re aged, you still need reading glasses, so what’s the point? Oh, that’s right, you could only have one eye done and then if you’re nearsighted, like I am, it would all work, as a matter of fact you can get one contact for distance and one for reading and supposedly your brain adjusts, but my doctor said if you read a lot, don’t, and I’m reading all day.

And speaking of quality, the truth is hard contacts give you much better vision than soft. But most people are pussies and cannot handle the pain. Whereas we He-Men of the Universe, inoculated back in the sixties, are used to having boulders in our eyes and can tolerate anything, hell, I wore two right lenses for two years, you see I was going to an exam and it was way early and I put one contact on top of the other and lost one in the extraction process and didn’t know which was which and I had to order one via mail, being far from Connecticut in the wilderness of Vermont, and I guessed wrong. And when I asked the ophthalmologist to check the two years later, he said it was impossible, that I’d know, but I didn’t, and I was right.

And the truth is no one really wears hard contacts anymore, you wear GAS PERMEABLES, which are a true breakthrough, because then your eye doesn’t conform as much to the lens itself, you see air passes through and I can see great but…

I’ve got this thing in one eye, it only happens in one eye, where there’s some kind of allergy that clouds the lens. And the traditional solution, now known as Boston, even though way back when I was addicted to the pink bottles of Barnes-Hind, just isn’t strong enough to clean the lenses, or in this case lens, because, as I just stated, it only occurs in one eye.

This is when my genius doctor put me on Lobob, which I used to laugh at in the aisle of the drugstore, whenever I’d see it, which was rare. Lobob had amateurish packaging, it looked like it was cooked up in someone’s garage, but now they’ve got state of the art design, never underestimate logos and artwork, they make a difference, can you say STEVE JOBS?, and Lobob Optimum works great, because it’s so damn STRONG!

I know you don’t care, but if you do, you can take a peek at their page here:

Lobob

And if you do, you’ll find there are three necessary packages, CDS for soaking, WRW for wetting and rewetting, and the hot sauce of contact lens solutions, ESC, the EXTRA STRENGTH CLEANER! You’re only supposed to use it once a week, but with my allergy I need to use it every day, and it solves the problem, but a little dab’ll do ya, and like I said, I made a mistake, I thought I was picking up WRW, which one goes through regularly, and I bought three packages of ESC, and one lasts nearly a year.

Now I could have returned them, if I still had the receipt, but come on, my time is worth something so I didn’t and then last night I decided to do the calculation, whether my bottles were gonna expire before I used them.

So I looked for the expiration date and saw it was 2020!

Not like the TV show, not like Barbara Walters, but as in twenty years after the millennium, HOW DID WE GET HERE?

Talk to a boomer and you’ll find that he or she was always calculating what age they’d be in the year 2000. But we’re past that. And we haven’t decided how to label the new era ever since.

Now, occasionally, people talk about 2000-2009 as the aughts, but during the period almost no one did.

And now that the teens are almost over, I’ve still never ever heard a single person refer to this decade as such, even though when I was growing up we referred to the period from 1910-1919 as the teens. Are we waiting for the twenties, as in ROARING?

Meanwhile, time keeps marching on.

So I’m sitting on a couch on Easter Sunday and we’re trading customs stories. And the dentist tells us he was busted twenty five years ago, and I realized that was 1993! That seems like YESTERDAY! But it’s twenty five years ago.

I remember the teenager, the high school student who lived with her mother across the walkway from my sister on Dorothy Street when I first moved to L.A., she was 16, oh-so-young. But thinking about it now, I realize today she’s 59!!! Eeegads! The teen stars of the eighties, they’re entering menopause. Meanwhile, they keep making new people. They’re just shoving the rest of us down the moving sidewalk of life, until we fall off the end.

And we don’t believe it, but we’re confronted with it. Reach 65 and you feel like you want to retire, because everybody else is, and the game of life is now so much less interesting, you’ve figured it out, realize nothing’s gonna last so you might as well have a good time, assuming you’ve got your health and some cash, which not that many have, at least not both.

So some take social security early. I’m never gonna do that, I don’t want to outlive my money, some friends of my parents did this, they ended up with a reverse mortgage, depending upon their kids, it’s ugly. So do you live for today or live for tomorrow? Do you spend or save?

Meanwhile, no one is stopping the train to ask these questions. The institutions just keep rolling on. Don’t we need a committee to get us all to agree to call this decade the teens? Then again, we couldn’t get everybody to agree to the metric system, which is quite a fail. You’re in a foreign country looking at the speedometer, freaking out, and then you realize it’s in kilometers. As for Celsius, go to Canada enough and you learn you double it and add thirty two, but in a nation where people can’t even name their Representative I doubt they can fathom that, and in the era of calculators no one can do math in their head anyway.

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