Over the years, Randy and I have established a Weeknight Routine in which we do, wear, watch, and eat pretty much the exact same things from night to night to night. It's easy and familiar and unerringly consistent, our routine. I assume most couples fall into similar patterns of habit. Maybe not, though; maybe when you guys get home at night, you spin a giant wheel of Random Adventure and then end up gleefully hitchhiking to Florida or having sex in a tree or something, I don't know. The only wheel we're spinning over here has "Red Gym Shorts / Blue Gym Shorts" on it, and Blue Gym Shorts is crossed out.
My part of the routine essentially entails piling up on the couch with a stack of zombie skins to sew while periodically piping up to criticize Randy's piss poor Tivo forwarding skills. ("Where Did The Time Go: A Life Completely Skipped Over With Three Bloop-Bloops" is going on that man's tombstone.) But lately I find I'm having a really hard time seeing anything. I'm wearing my glasses but I'm still squinting a lot, and I'm constantly hovering directly underneath the table lamp.
"It's fucking
dark in here!" I yelled last night, throwing a zombie skin at Randy. "I can't fucking
see anything in this
room!"
Randy appraised me calmly over his nightly cashew ration. Just one more impulsive, spastic complaint to add to my portfolio. Right in between "IT'S FUCKING
HOT IN HERE!" wherein I punch the air conditioner button in the car with both fists and hang my head out the window to dissolve the rabies foam in my mouth, and "IT'S FUCKING
COLD IN HERE!" wherein I commandeer the entire bed comforter in one furious yank and then bury myself in it, shivering and foaming with the rabies.
"It's not dark," Randy said evenly, no doubt on foam alert, "You're just getting older and your eyes don't work as well."
Randy wrongly took my ensuing silence-- a silence I was using to gather vocal strength and maximum foam-- as a cue to continue this riveting explanation as to the hastening collapse of my body and its functions.
"As you get older, your corneas begin to change shape which prohibits light from focusing on the retina. So it gets harder to see. Especially you," he went on. "You have a pretty pronounced astigmatism, so light's going to bounce around unequally on your retinas, anyway."
I don't remember if that's actually what he said. It doesn't really matter; Randy knows me well enough to know that I can be disarmed and shooed away from just about any argument with this scary futuristic spaceman talk. He could have said, "As you get older, electromagnetism binds with the chemical components of strawberry jam, causing your lymphatic system to refract into gravitational acceleration, proving once and for all the Coccyx Theory of Choo-Choo Trains," and it would have had the exact same effect on me: mute fury.
Blinded as I was by this one-two punch of anatomy and science, I found myself accepting that maybe he was right. Maybe all my squinting was just a natural consequence of age. I imagined my corneas flattening into tiny saucers full of jam and miniature choo-choos.
"We'll just have to get you a little magnifying glass to wear around your neck."
Oh, were my flat ass eyes deceiving me, or was Randy actually
smirking? I looked around the family room then, a 30' by 30' space we were attempting to illuminate with two ten-watt light bulbs and a smoke alarm. Fooled! By an old man and his fake science! I felt a foam resurgence.
"You're full of shit," I countered. "It's pitch black in here. We're getting some lamps."
My eyeballs are flattening? Yeah, nice try, Randy. Watch, next he'll try to convince me that I can't hear as well because my "ears" are weakening with "age". Like I don't know that Planet Earth is just getting quieter. Or that the reason we can't have sex in a tree is because of "gravity", not because one of us is a chicken shit.
