Ugh, this morning I had an allergy sneeze attack, so I raided my work’s first aid kit and ended up taking some generic no-name cold medicine because that is all they had. My nose dried up but now I am all woozy.
Sometimes I get really annoyed when I see something amusing and I do not have my camera on me to record it. For instance, Friday night Alan and I wandered down to the West End for a beer. There ended up being a crazy bum in there. I mean, the total ranting and raving kind. It was some old black dude with a beard, winter jacket, and was wearing a knit cap as well as the battered remains of some sort of foam novelty hat. He had with him a bag and a boom box tuned to static. I have no idea what he was yelling about, but he was going on and on at the top of his lungs to no one in particular. At one point he crawled up on the little stage in there and started ranting from there, but they coaxed him down. I am surprised they did not simply kick him out. In stead he returned to his corner and ranted and raved there while most of the people ignored him.
I also got a chance to check out that new martini bar in Sanford. I have to admit; it is cool as hell in there. Glowing marble countertops, bubbles in the walls, pillars of real fire spiraling up. It was pretty damn neat in there, but to be honest it felt a little like a strip club without the strippers. It was a total chick bar though, filled mostly with 30-ish year old women sipping on their girl drinks. Not that I am one to talk, I ended up sucking down several apple martini’s. Those things were sweet and sticky and ended up getting me blasted, however I regretted them the next morning when they have me a roaring hangovers. I rarely get hangovers of the headache-kind, but those apple martinis did it for me. Still, I’ll go back there again one day.
The next morning I went down to the mall to get an eye exam so that I can get contacts again. I went to vision works, which accepts walk-ins, and they told me I had an hour to wait. I had my E-book with me, so I went to pass the time sitting on one of those massaging chairs they have scattered around the mall. I idly fed the machine a five-dollar bill and it proceeded to violently molest me. I dunno, I just do not see the appeal in those chairs. I could probably go into the mall parking lot and have a couple of skateboarding teens ride over me for the same effect. I grunted and squirmed each time a knob poked me in the back, and to my horror at one time the entire machine started to vibrate. Luckily it was early and the mall was fairly empty, so a crowd did not gather to point at laugh at the jiggling fat guy. When it finally ended I did not feel relaxed, I just felt relived that it was over with.
Finally I went up for my eye exam. A cheerful middle aged chunky lady, who I guess was some sort of ’nurse’ made me jump the usual hoops. Look in one machine. Put my face in the machine that squirts air on them. Peer at the letters project on the wall. Finally she said ’The doctor will see you in just a minute’. She said it in hushed tones as if I was awaiting audience with the pope.
Finally the doctor came in. I had to suppress a smirk. The guy had to have been in his late twenties, wore slacks and a purple silk shirt, sported slicked-up black hair and looked remarkably like ’Joey’ from ’Friends’. He looked like someone who should be making my drinks in a night club. I wonder how many teenage mall girls have sighed over him.
Anyways he busted out a scope and checked my eyes, muttered a few things under his breath, and then scribbled off my prescription. His entire visit was under five minutes and he did not even dilate my eyes, something I suppose I was thankful for. My entire visit was over in less than twenty minutes. They gave me a single pair of contacts and presented me with my bill. 99 bucks. 99 bucks for a stupid eye exam that probably could have been preformed by an automated photo booth equipped with YES/NO buttons. Goddamn I hate optometrist. Stupid rip-off snake oil salesman. 99 bucks for his grubby signature on a square of paper so that I can order contacts online. Gleah! I hate them!
I just anal raped your wallet!
2026 Update
Dialing the infernal machine back to 2008, where Ed pays a fortune to be poked by a chair shaped like a sadist.
Eighteen years later, that five-dollar massage chair has been replaced by a subscription app that vibrates your phone and calls it wellness. Back then you fed a bill into a mall machine and it molested you in public; now you pay monthly for a meditation circle that never actually touches you. The 99-dollar eye exam, meanwhile, would today be an online quiz, a webcam photo, and a pair of glasses shipped from a warehouse while a contact-lens company harvests your retina data for targeted ads. And let us mourn the glowing fire-pillar martini bar. That neon-and-open-flame aesthetic now survives only as a budget airport lounge, replaced by establishments that charge eighteen dollars for a pickle juice spritz and call it artisan. Even the ranting barroom oracle with the static boom box has been digitized: his modern counterpart screams into a livestream from a studio apartment and gets demonetized. Ed, you were ripped off, you were molested by knobs, and you called it a night. The world did not get saner. It just charges for the privilege of the same nonsense.
“2008 Ed, which was the real gamble that night: the strange phantom ranting on the bar stage, or the glowing pillar of fire spiral that convinced you a strip-club-without-strippers was a reasonable place to spend your dignity and morning after?” — Beelzebubba the Third
2008 Ed: Well, Beelzebubba, I gotta say the real gamble that night was me, period. The ranting phantom on the stage was just free entertainment, and honestly, a crazy dude with a boom box tuned to static is a lot less dangerous than a glowing pillar of fire that made me think, “Hey, this is like a strip club without the strippers!” That’s the kinda decision you pay for the next morning with an apple martini hangover. So I’d say the fire spiral was the gamble, because it sucked me in, literally and figuratively, and then I wobbled out of there feeling like I’d been mugged by a drunk carnival. But the realest gamble was thinking an eye exam would cost less than ninety-nine bucks. That’s the true robbery. At least the bum didn’t charge me.
