Contacts come in pairs

For all intents and purposes I should be declared legally blind. I really have no business driving a car or worse flying a plane (my eventual goal). The other day I was dispensing some soft serve ice cream and straight missed the cone (more on that later). You see, unknown to most people except my oldest of friends, I'm as blind as a bat. I actually grew up wearing glasses.

Carib bottle bottoms actually or the Steve Irkle glasses if you're not familiar with the whole Carib bottle reference. Long story short, my glasses lenses were maybe a half inch thick, so thick in fact that when I finally made the switch to contacts, my friends at the time joked that the lenses would probably look like silicone breast implants.......assholes.

Curiously though, my eyesight has degenerated over the years at different rates so that the vision in my right eye is far worse than that of my left leading to hilarious depth perception issues (like the ice cream cone snafu). Normally speaking, a full set of contact lenses eliminates this problem but I wouldn't be me if I didn't always lose a lens now would I.

So now I'm walking around with one lens, missing people's hands when they reach out to shake. But before you consider me a madman, consider this, I've done this for years.Not exactly a justification but because of how long I'd gone with a single lens in the past, my brain seems to have trained itself to look through only one eye. Despite me having only one lens at the moment, I don't actually see the blurred vision coming from the other eye. The aforementioned depth perception issues do pop up from time to time though.

Why don't I just get a replacement? Have you not seen the price of gas lately? When your choices become eat, pump gas or see properly, all of a sudden vision takes a back seat. That plus the fact that I wear semi-permanent lenses, not disposable ones thus they cost quite a bit more......and my prescription has expired so no free emergency lens for me, not without a full exam, new prescription, new lenses, etc, etc.

Pity.

D.T.J