Hello, Failure

Of all the enemies of literature, success is the most insidious

Monday, February 14, 2005

Failure of the Day: New! Glasses! Sort of!

After a search lasting nearly 2 years and with at least one false start (last years lime green cat-eyes were pretty, but made me look like a cylon), I have finally found a new pair of glasses!

They are incredible; I’ve never seen anything remotely like them (and I’ve seen a lot of glasses). They are also just breathtakingly expensive; roughly twice as much as every other pair I dismissed for being too expensive. I’ve got them on lay-away for god sakes. But I saw them and I tried them on and they were … undeniable. Sometimes when we’re watching Smalllville, Chris just goes to pieces over the sappiest sap in Sapville, I hold out my hand and say “This is the show.” And then I stick my finger deep into the palm of my hand and say “And this is you.” It was like that with these frames. I live in the deep soft palm of its hand.

After much discussion and no small amount of salesmanship, I put down a deposit. We left the shop and set out to wander West Portal—rapidly becoming one of my favorite parts of town—and the stages of anxiety set in. At first I was very nervous about the expense, so certain I am that any large expenditure of money must always be followed by layoff or other financial disaster. Then I became absolutely convinced that I didn’t really like the glasses as much as I thought I did and that I would soon be full of rue.

Chris—well versed on how to handle my crises of faith—deftly dispatched these worries with a few hundred soothing words as we wandered from quaint toy store to quaint candy store.

When we got home, I grew ever more worried that the saleslady in the store was in fact a con artist who would certainly abscond with my deposit and my beautiful glasses, and when next I returned to West Portal Optics I would find an innocent bakery at that spot and an old man insisting there had always been a bakery at that address since his beloved and late father had opened it in 1911. It was suggested that I perhaps am overly imaginative in an unnecessarily David Mamet kind of way.

This morning, in preparation of this blog entry, I searched the ENTIRE internet for a photo of the glasses I could link to, hampered only by the fact that I didn’t know the style name or number or the name of the company that manufactures them. Inexplicably, I came up empty. I couldn’t find them anywhere. I then began to worry that there are no glasses at all, and that I had made the whole thing up. It is a very short leap from Mamet to PK Dick, it turns out.

SciFi/existential rifts in the space/time continuum notwithstanding, I will hopefully have my new glasses by summer.

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