my eyes will eventually fall out
Thursday evening was going to be the rinse. First I was meeting up with an old buddy of mine from back in baltimore, who I haven't seen in about 12 years or so...then I was going to shoot over to the MJQ/Drunken Unicorn funtime music complex for the Fuck Yess partyjam. You guys know I -never- go out anymore, which I always complain about, so I was pretty stoked to finally have gotten off my butt to get it done for a change.
Things went bad from the get go. First off, it was raining, which means traffic would be sketchy. But I wasn't going to back down, it was ON. One of the last things that I do before leaving the hut is to put my contact lens in. This time when I put it in, it burned like hell and my eye started watering (I only have a lens for one eye), but I chalked that up to not rinsing off the cleaning solution before popping it in, which happens sometimes when I am in a rush. So I pushed on...
Stopped by the bank robot and inserted some loot, which was sort of out of the way, so I had to take 85south instead of 985. The whole time my eye is watering so bad it looks like I am crying. On the upside though, there is a rest stop on 85 so I can go to the restroom and sort out any issue with my lens. So I head to the rest stop, and just before I turn into it, there is a sign that says "restrooms 7am to 7pm". Dang, it was 7:46p. Oh well, I'll just have to use the rear view mirror in the car and do my best.
Using the rear view I was able to see that the lens was not centered on my eye, it was pushed down into the corner towards my nose. Now, here is a side note...unlike regular people I cannot -blink- my contact out. I have little squinty eyes and I cannot wink, so in order to remove the contact, I have to use this little mini suction cup device, which I did not have with me at this time. So, in order to fix the alignment, i had to -slide the lens about 1/2" into the proper position-, which I did, and things seemed to be on track. Some sketchy dude came up to my car and tried to talk to me about something and I felt like he was sizing me up to rob me, so I cut it short rudely and just rolled up the window on him and took off.
So I continue onward. The rain starts pissing down, I'm jamming to a wicked selection of old school souther soul tunes. my eye is still watering but I -know it is okay now, it'll stop inna while-, so I just keep going. The GPS is telling me to take an exit off the highway that is on the left. The exit comes and goes...it wasn't on the left. Uh oh...that sucks because now I am going to have to take an alternate route to Buckhead. Man I just kept driving and driving and finally I flip around and it is taking me north on 75, and I am like "what the hell?", but at this point I am at the GPS mercy.
It ended up working out well that I had missed the exit. The series of side streets and such that I ended up taking to get to the hotel were actually a little easier to nav than the correct route, and as a bonus, now I was heading north on Peachtree, which was the side the hotel was on.
The next challenge was parking. I had called the hotel, and they said they had NO hourly parking. The rates were $18 a day, or $21 a day for valet. Shorty, lemme tell you something...I would seriously walk up to half a mile in the rain in my suede vans and cheap embarassing Estee Lauder beat up old ass umbrella that someone left in my car years ago rather than pay 18 dolleros just to shelve my ride for a few hours. Every time I use that umbrella I keep waiting for the jokes to come in..."what did you get that as a free gift when you bought some eye shadow and blush bob?" hardee har har. But I still haven't gotten around to buying a proper umbrella because until 2009, it never rained a drop in georgia. Maybe I'll go buy a proper PING or Calloway umbrella today. The point is, I wasn't going to pay to park, whether it meant using the tiny girlie umbrella or not. Luck was on my side here though, because right next to the hotel was a little shopping strip with a bunch of vacant stores, and the two stores that were operational were closed for the evening, so I ended up parking like 100 feet from the hotel front door! It waqs pissing down though, so I still had to use the lame umbrella...and my freakin suede Vans got a lil wet, but not too bad.
Once in the hotel, I called my friend and he asked if I was up for getting some dinner, which I was, so he said, "okay well there is a Ruth's Chris in the hotel, I'll be down in a second". Uh oh. I didn't look like my usual bummy hobo self, but I didn't think I was dressed for Ruth's Chris. They didn't seem to crowded though, so I figured I could get away with what I was wearing, and once we were inside, it turned out to be a non issue anyway. We sat at the bar where you could get away with being a little more casual.
So...Ruth's Chris...hmmm, well, I remember that years ago when I worked at the bike shop in Baltimore one of my co-workers used to listen to Rush Limbaugh and Ruth's Chris was one of his big sponsors, so Rush would get on and do these long spoken word commercials for them. I couldn't help but think about that while we were ordering some drinks. Rush may be a blowhard asshole, but man he pitched this steakhouse like it was some kind of seared flesh utopia, and I was actually kind of interested to see how it was going to be. I knew it was going to be expensive, but I figured what the hell, I might as well go BIG for once and do it up. Then my friend says "oh by the way my company is paying for dinner", and after that it was ON!
I'm not a foodie like some of you guys are, but I will say, the food was pretty dog gone good. I didn't realize til later in the dinner that the wine we were drinking was like a 75$ bottle. We started off with some sort of tuna dealie, which was seared on the outside with this nice sort of peppery crust, but still raw in the middle, with a little bit of some kind of sauce drizzled all around. After I got used to the mushy texture I kind of dug it. My buddy got the rib eye, and I got the NY Strip. Thirty nine dolleros for the strip, but lemme tell you, it was freakin awesome, When they bring it out to you the plate is a zillion degrees so you have to be really careful, and the steak continues to sizzle for like 5 minutes. You don't put any sauce or anything on a steak like this, you just eat it plain because it is that tasty. I would have loved it even more if my eye wasn't watering the whole time. The whole scene was made even more surreal because we are sitting in this kind of fancy place eating pricey grub and generally being sort of high falootin, but meanwhile my friend is talking about his two stints in jail for selling coke, telling me about another old friend of ours who just got caught the other day for with enough weight that his bail is a million bucks, and of course I am telling him my sad story about how I became a meth head for a few years. My friend is kind of the loud type, and the bar area was kind of quiet, so I knew people around us could hear all about our druggie past and associates. For the record, my friend has now gone straight and works for a telecom flying around the country programming PBX phone systems...he is no longer involved in any powder slinging. We capped the dinner with some 12 year old Maccallen single malt, which was like a warm comfortable pillow for the inside of your mouth. Very good stuff.
So eventually it came time to split, and I was feeling pretty good from all the wine and the beer and the scotch, so I'm thinking it would be fun to head over to the Fuck Yess party, so I head that way. The drive was not fun. My eye is still watering like crazy and I am still convinced that eventually it will settle down. The rain is not helping with visibility. But I forge on. I'm thinking, every time I have ever been to MJQunicorn it hasn't even begun to get crowded til after midnite, so I pull in the parking lot thinking there will be spaces. Boy was I wrong. There was a gigantic line of people and I ended up having back out of the parking lot because of traffic, which was NOT fun. By this point my eye is killing me so bad that I just want to get to a bathroom so I can take the contact out. If I am going to make it to the club, I am not going to walk around looking like I am crying all night. So I head down to Fellinis thinking I will duck in there and use the restroom to remove the contact and then continue on with my journey.
In Fellinis, I put some paper towels down in the bottom of the sink so that if I drop my lens, it won't go down the drain. I have already told you that i usually use a suction cup device to remove the thing, but I didn't have it so I was just going to have to make due. The lens came out with no problem, and it was at this moment that I looked down at it and noticed that about a quarter of the lens was missing! I touched the lens lightly to see if the missing chunk were underneath the lens, and it cracked off another big portion. So, basically what had happened was, the lens broke at some point during my adventure, and the sharp edges are what had been irritating my eye the whole time. It was so freakin painful!
It was at this point that I decided to call it a night, and that I'd better re-focus on the making it home. I don't like to drive without my contact, and the rain was not making it any easier to see. Neither was the pain, or the tears or whatever was gushing out of my eye at this point. The drive home was brutal. By Shallowford road, the a/c in the car had stopped blowing cold air, so the windows fogged up so bad that I had to get off the road because I couldn't see anything. I just sat in a gas station parking lot feeling pitiful for a while til the rain calmed down. I tried another defroster strategy...if I couldn't un-condensate with cold air, maybe I could just burn off the window fog with heat. I turned the defroster all the way up, and the temp all the way up, cracked my window so I wouoldn't cook, and continued on my way. By the time I got to Discovery Mills the windows were fine, but by this point my eye was just throbbing, and it seemed extremely sensitive to any light. Thankfully, the closer you get to Flowery Branch, the darker it gets. I doin't think I have ever been so happy to see my driveway.
It was a pretty crazy adventure. This morning my eye is only a little swollen but I had to pry it apart from all the gunk that built up overnight. It doesn't hurt anymore thank goodness. I guess now I have to go get an exam and another lens and all that crap. I am over due for that stuff anyway, plus I want some new glasses too. I'm curious to hear if wearing the broken lens actually scratched the surface of my eye, but I dunno if I will get to an eye doc before it may heal up. The lens lasted about three years I guess...I can't complain.
Things went bad from the get go. First off, it was raining, which means traffic would be sketchy. But I wasn't going to back down, it was ON. One of the last things that I do before leaving the hut is to put my contact lens in. This time when I put it in, it burned like hell and my eye started watering (I only have a lens for one eye), but I chalked that up to not rinsing off the cleaning solution before popping it in, which happens sometimes when I am in a rush. So I pushed on...
Stopped by the bank robot and inserted some loot, which was sort of out of the way, so I had to take 85south instead of 985. The whole time my eye is watering so bad it looks like I am crying. On the upside though, there is a rest stop on 85 so I can go to the restroom and sort out any issue with my lens. So I head to the rest stop, and just before I turn into it, there is a sign that says "restrooms 7am to 7pm". Dang, it was 7:46p. Oh well, I'll just have to use the rear view mirror in the car and do my best.
Using the rear view I was able to see that the lens was not centered on my eye, it was pushed down into the corner towards my nose. Now, here is a side note...unlike regular people I cannot -blink- my contact out. I have little squinty eyes and I cannot wink, so in order to remove the contact, I have to use this little mini suction cup device, which I did not have with me at this time. So, in order to fix the alignment, i had to -slide the lens about 1/2" into the proper position-, which I did, and things seemed to be on track. Some sketchy dude came up to my car and tried to talk to me about something and I felt like he was sizing me up to rob me, so I cut it short rudely and just rolled up the window on him and took off.
So I continue onward. The rain starts pissing down, I'm jamming to a wicked selection of old school souther soul tunes. my eye is still watering but I -know it is okay now, it'll stop inna while-, so I just keep going. The GPS is telling me to take an exit off the highway that is on the left. The exit comes and goes...it wasn't on the left. Uh oh...that sucks because now I am going to have to take an alternate route to Buckhead. Man I just kept driving and driving and finally I flip around and it is taking me north on 75, and I am like "what the hell?", but at this point I am at the GPS mercy.
It ended up working out well that I had missed the exit. The series of side streets and such that I ended up taking to get to the hotel were actually a little easier to nav than the correct route, and as a bonus, now I was heading north on Peachtree, which was the side the hotel was on.
The next challenge was parking. I had called the hotel, and they said they had NO hourly parking. The rates were $18 a day, or $21 a day for valet. Shorty, lemme tell you something...I would seriously walk up to half a mile in the rain in my suede vans and cheap embarassing Estee Lauder beat up old ass umbrella that someone left in my car years ago rather than pay 18 dolleros just to shelve my ride for a few hours. Every time I use that umbrella I keep waiting for the jokes to come in..."what did you get that as a free gift when you bought some eye shadow and blush bob?" hardee har har. But I still haven't gotten around to buying a proper umbrella because until 2009, it never rained a drop in georgia. Maybe I'll go buy a proper PING or Calloway umbrella today. The point is, I wasn't going to pay to park, whether it meant using the tiny girlie umbrella or not. Luck was on my side here though, because right next to the hotel was a little shopping strip with a bunch of vacant stores, and the two stores that were operational were closed for the evening, so I ended up parking like 100 feet from the hotel front door! It waqs pissing down though, so I still had to use the lame umbrella...and my freakin suede Vans got a lil wet, but not too bad.
Once in the hotel, I called my friend and he asked if I was up for getting some dinner, which I was, so he said, "okay well there is a Ruth's Chris in the hotel, I'll be down in a second". Uh oh. I didn't look like my usual bummy hobo self, but I didn't think I was dressed for Ruth's Chris. They didn't seem to crowded though, so I figured I could get away with what I was wearing, and once we were inside, it turned out to be a non issue anyway. We sat at the bar where you could get away with being a little more casual.
So...Ruth's Chris...hmmm, well, I remember that years ago when I worked at the bike shop in Baltimore one of my co-workers used to listen to Rush Limbaugh and Ruth's Chris was one of his big sponsors, so Rush would get on and do these long spoken word commercials for them. I couldn't help but think about that while we were ordering some drinks. Rush may be a blowhard asshole, but man he pitched this steakhouse like it was some kind of seared flesh utopia, and I was actually kind of interested to see how it was going to be. I knew it was going to be expensive, but I figured what the hell, I might as well go BIG for once and do it up. Then my friend says "oh by the way my company is paying for dinner", and after that it was ON!
I'm not a foodie like some of you guys are, but I will say, the food was pretty dog gone good. I didn't realize til later in the dinner that the wine we were drinking was like a 75$ bottle. We started off with some sort of tuna dealie, which was seared on the outside with this nice sort of peppery crust, but still raw in the middle, with a little bit of some kind of sauce drizzled all around. After I got used to the mushy texture I kind of dug it. My buddy got the rib eye, and I got the NY Strip. Thirty nine dolleros for the strip, but lemme tell you, it was freakin awesome, When they bring it out to you the plate is a zillion degrees so you have to be really careful, and the steak continues to sizzle for like 5 minutes. You don't put any sauce or anything on a steak like this, you just eat it plain because it is that tasty. I would have loved it even more if my eye wasn't watering the whole time. The whole scene was made even more surreal because we are sitting in this kind of fancy place eating pricey grub and generally being sort of high falootin, but meanwhile my friend is talking about his two stints in jail for selling coke, telling me about another old friend of ours who just got caught the other day for with enough weight that his bail is a million bucks, and of course I am telling him my sad story about how I became a meth head for a few years. My friend is kind of the loud type, and the bar area was kind of quiet, so I knew people around us could hear all about our druggie past and associates. For the record, my friend has now gone straight and works for a telecom flying around the country programming PBX phone systems...he is no longer involved in any powder slinging. We capped the dinner with some 12 year old Maccallen single malt, which was like a warm comfortable pillow for the inside of your mouth. Very good stuff.
So eventually it came time to split, and I was feeling pretty good from all the wine and the beer and the scotch, so I'm thinking it would be fun to head over to the Fuck Yess party, so I head that way. The drive was not fun. My eye is still watering like crazy and I am still convinced that eventually it will settle down. The rain is not helping with visibility. But I forge on. I'm thinking, every time I have ever been to MJQunicorn it hasn't even begun to get crowded til after midnite, so I pull in the parking lot thinking there will be spaces. Boy was I wrong. There was a gigantic line of people and I ended up having back out of the parking lot because of traffic, which was NOT fun. By this point my eye is killing me so bad that I just want to get to a bathroom so I can take the contact out. If I am going to make it to the club, I am not going to walk around looking like I am crying all night. So I head down to Fellinis thinking I will duck in there and use the restroom to remove the contact and then continue on with my journey.
In Fellinis, I put some paper towels down in the bottom of the sink so that if I drop my lens, it won't go down the drain. I have already told you that i usually use a suction cup device to remove the thing, but I didn't have it so I was just going to have to make due. The lens came out with no problem, and it was at this moment that I looked down at it and noticed that about a quarter of the lens was missing! I touched the lens lightly to see if the missing chunk were underneath the lens, and it cracked off another big portion. So, basically what had happened was, the lens broke at some point during my adventure, and the sharp edges are what had been irritating my eye the whole time. It was so freakin painful!
It was at this point that I decided to call it a night, and that I'd better re-focus on the making it home. I don't like to drive without my contact, and the rain was not making it any easier to see. Neither was the pain, or the tears or whatever was gushing out of my eye at this point. The drive home was brutal. By Shallowford road, the a/c in the car had stopped blowing cold air, so the windows fogged up so bad that I had to get off the road because I couldn't see anything. I just sat in a gas station parking lot feeling pitiful for a while til the rain calmed down. I tried another defroster strategy...if I couldn't un-condensate with cold air, maybe I could just burn off the window fog with heat. I turned the defroster all the way up, and the temp all the way up, cracked my window so I wouoldn't cook, and continued on my way. By the time I got to Discovery Mills the windows were fine, but by this point my eye was just throbbing, and it seemed extremely sensitive to any light. Thankfully, the closer you get to Flowery Branch, the darker it gets. I doin't think I have ever been so happy to see my driveway.
It was a pretty crazy adventure. This morning my eye is only a little swollen but I had to pry it apart from all the gunk that built up overnight. It doesn't hurt anymore thank goodness. I guess now I have to go get an exam and another lens and all that crap. I am over due for that stuff anyway, plus I want some new glasses too. I'm curious to hear if wearing the broken lens actually scratched the surface of my eye, but I dunno if I will get to an eye doc before it may heal up. The lens lasted about three years I guess...I can't complain.