went to get new glasses today. got the prescription at costco last week, and have put off getting the actual new glasses.i ended up giving the local shop another try, after poor luck with them last time. they still seemed kind of confused when i walked in, as if i had no business being there. i got into a conversation with the doctor, though, the guy who fitted the glasses and all that. he hates his life and wishes he made a living in a more meaningful pursuit. we talked about cemeteries. i told him that i needed separate sets of eyeglasses and sunglasses, because of the little screens on the digital cameras. i assumed he had heard of this, but he had not. when i wear sunglasses the led/lcd screens (on most if not all of the digital cameras i have used) becomes invisible. the first time i encountered this was with a canon g9. i turned the camera on, put on my sunglasses, and the screen was completely dark, like i had not turned the camera on at all. i thought i had, in fact, not turned the thing on, but then i happened to glance out over the sunglasses and saw that the camera was on and the screen worked. i just could not see it through my sunglasses. similar things happened with other cameras. i think the canon a640 had the same problem, though only when i turned the camera vertical. i lost the sunglasses but now that i saw the surprise registered on the eyedoctor‘s face today i want to get a new set of RayBans and see if i am full of shit on this vital matter. actually, i do think it‘s a relatively important/interesting thing.
so we got into a conversation about cemeteries, and how i sometimes do forensic genealogistic photography at the nyc yards, and he thought that was all cool, “a better thing than being an eye doctor“, or something like that, a whiff of bitterness from an unsatisfied life. after i left i remembered that the guy‘s office, the shop which bears his name, is actually on top of a cemetery. it‘s a 19th century cemetery which was supposedly routed and all the burials moved to St. Michael‘s, but years after the exhumations were supposedly complete more bodies turned up blocks away from where maps and city planners had said that the cemetery boundaries were. news reports of the day said that children were found playing on Broadway with the bones of the dead. the area was mostly paved over with a parking lot, a grocery store, apartment buildings, and it‘s possible though not documented anywhere that the place where i bought a pair of glasses today is on top of a swarm of poltergeists waiting to erupt. i plan to inform the eye doctor of this on my return visit next week. this and the fact that a nearby sculpture park is surrounded by tombstones and pillars from the aforementoined st. michael‘s cemetery.
the dude seemed interested in these things. i am glad i went in. i almost did not.
this time around i want to get several sets of glasses, sunglasses, and the like. i have but one set of glasses now and this is a perilous situation. i remember when, in high school, i was mowing the lawn in tampa and a lovebug got under my glasses. i went to swipe away the lovebug but i grabbed the glasses instead, and they went flying, 3 or 4 feet forward, into the grass and into the jaws of the lawn mower. instant mangle, instant cremation of the plastic glasses, instant fuzzy vision with no backup, instant instant. my mother said she would not have believed it herself had she not happened to be looking out the window at the moment of this crazed bit of insecticidal flailing.
we went to the eye doctor post haste to get a new pair of glasses. the eye doctor and mother became instant friends, both of them women of about the same age, the eye doctor a forest fire of a redhead, droopy Yoko-like boobs, and a cracklingly loud laugh, just like mom.
i have to go.
