One recent evening, I was not feeling well. I checked to be sure I didn’t have a fever and sniffed various pleasantly scented items around the house to make sure my sense of smell was still intact. Reassured by the results of these evaluations, I decided to take a hot bath, put on my pajamas and relax early.
A little later, snug in my bathrobe, I warmed up a bowl of soup and began to pump clear liquids. I intended to “veg”, as I say; “Relax”, as my two oldest children say; or “vibrate”, as my two youngest say. As I felt ugly and lacking in vigor and vigor, it occurred to me that I was alive long enough to acquire fluency in at least three generational vernaculars. No wonder I feel tired.
While pondering that thought, I picked up my phone with the intention of mindlessly scrolling through Pinterest when I realized my reading glasses weren’t close at hand and nothing on my phone was wrong. was quite visible to me.
I have unwittingly come to the magical stage of life where sometimes my eyes will see very well, and other times they will force me to play a game with my phone. the game is not the one that is downloaded as an app and there is no charge for it other than maybe the youth toll. It seems that when the youth is almost exhausted you get the game like a kind of door prize.
I call him game “Too close, too far.” The game procedure involves holding my phone varying distances from my face until the text and images are crisp – or not crisp, as is often the case. As I grab my pop grip between my fingers, hoping it doesn’t come off and drop my phone, I move my arm back and forth at random intervals as in my head I hear a indefinable voice telling: “Too close, so far.” Waaayyy too far. Bring her back.
the game features teasing moments where the images will appear clearly for a split second and then disappear again. Sometimes I play for a while. If I win I can see what’s on my phone. If I lose, I have to go get my reading glasses or temporarily lose my ability to see or read information.
That night, after losing a few laps, I decided to turn on the TV. Since I couldn’t see what was on my phone, I thought it might be nice to watch something light and upbeat. I walked past shows like “B **** in ‘Rides” and “Dr. Pimple Popper. Apart from that, I came across an abundance of news programs with talking heads, and about six or eight fiction and non-fiction offerings on serial killers.
As alternative, I thought maybe “Little House on the Prairie” would be a good option. I went to Prime Video, clicked on the remote, and experienced a brief period of relaxation as the old familiar theme song began to play.
But then something terrible happened. A neighbor of the Ingalls family whom I had never seen before lost her daughter in a drowning accident. Overwhelmed by grief, the neighbor experienced a psychotic episode, kidnapped Laura and hid her in the cellar.
I tried another episode, only to find that Charles and Caroline left and left the girls at home alone. The girls were attacked by a pack of wolves in the barn. Laura had taken the ladder to the treehouse so they couldn’t even escape into the attic without a lot of excitement and white knuckle strain. Not wanting to submit to this kind of stress, I turned off the TV.
I thought again about smelling household objects. What stopped me was not the fact that it seemed like a weirdly eccentric thing to do, but the same fact that kept me from scrolling through my phone. Just as my reading glasses were not at hand …
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