The Pseudo-Chronicles of Mark Huntley

Doctor My Eyes - 9/29/04

Wednesday, September 29, 2004

I went to see Dr. Leonsis today. I hadn’t wanted to schedule another appointment during the workday, so I'd made it for late, five-fifteen. His last appointment of the day, in fact, and he gave me the impression of itching to be out the door. 

That is, until he ran a few vision tests and got a good look at my peepers.

"Wait a minute," he said.

"My prescription's changed," I told him.

"Your prescription's changed," he said. He sounded—there’s no other word for it—dumbfounded. And you know what? I cherished the moment.

I wrinkled my brow. "So should I be worried?"

Dr. Leonsis just stared at me. Then, gradually, his confusion turned to anger. "What the hell did you do?"

"What?"

"Did you go behind my back and get some kind of corrective surgery?" He shook his head before I could answer. "No, I'd be able to tell..."

"My prescription just changed," I said, still being unhelpful.

"It can't just change," he said. "Not like that."

"Have you seen the first Spider-Man movie?" I asked.

The conversation went on like that, fruitlessly, and then finally he gave me the name of an ophthalmologist friend of his and sent me off. I think he's trying to get rid of me, hand me off to someone else. That's fine with me. I can’t say I’ve appreciated his attitude.

I'm not sure I like the way my face looks without glasses, now that I don't need them anymore. There's something naked about it. Profoundly naked. In fact, it doesn't even really look like my face anymore.

But it's been like that for a few days now. Maybe the spec-less look will grow on me, given time. My co-workers wondered why I suddenly stopped wearing glasses, so I told them that I was giving contacts a shot. 

Little do they know that I'm enrolled in the Zone of Weird Crap’s Preferred-Customer Vision Plan. Yes, after only a few short weeks of intense pain, you too can gain the ability to see inexplicable clouds of color or anti-color around passersby!

So my theory about the auras the other day—identifying the criminals around me, or the future criminals—I think we can agree that was pretty much bullpucky. I mean, how would the auras even determine what’s a crime and what’s not? Does somebody get an aura if they’ve only committed a misdemeanor?

Right. Bullpucky. But I have a new theory.

It’s totally spiritual.

I’ve been wondering, what if I’m suddenly sensing the energy of certain people around me, like in a New Age type way? I’m examining the possibility that all those hippies and crackpots have been right all along: that we can exude this misty stuff from our bodies that reflects our personality and emotions. Even if none of those hippies and crackpots can agree on the composition and nature of an aura.

From my careful research (i.e., plugging random terms in Google and clicking on the links on the first page of results), I’ve determined that these auras I’m seeing represent either A) a series of electromagnetic layers radiating from one inch to 32 inches away from the body, telling you what the person thinks and feels; B) seven layers of information corresponding to the seven chakras; or C) a tangible energy field that can emerge as not just colors, but shapes, textures, and symbols that your Third Eye can interpret as useful information.

Speaking of bullpucky, right? Anything to sell another self-help book that people can read while smoking dope and rubbing their fingers over each other’s crystals.

But this could mean something in a general sense. Like, these guru folks having an idea that an aura can transmit information to you, if you’re savvy enough to interpret it.

Thus I should think about how to read all these purple auras—surrounding people who seem to have little in common. Let’s say purple means anger. Then I’ve been seeing the several people near me who are truly angry. But there’s got to be more angry bastards in this city than the percentage that this would indicate. Same for any other basic human emotion: sadness, joy, fear. Very few emotions are niche. I should be seeing auras all over the place.

And the auras are too simple to represent more complex information such as thoughts. Unless “purple aura” simply translates to something like, “I am currently thinking about a dog.” In which case I’d have the most useless superpower known to mankind.

Yeah, and these auras seem like persistent states, too, arguing against them representing one particular passing thought. The human mind thinks about thousands of different things during a single day.

Here’s another problem with this theory—it doesn’t address the rest of the ZoWC. Like, not just how my eyes adjusted all on their own and my vision improved… but also, the guy who was following me, who put that Police song into all those people’s heads at the same time. 

He didn’t have an aura—but wait, what if my eyes just weren’t ready to see it yet, before they adjusted? What if he really did have one?

I might be getting somewhere. Let’s look at another piece.

Those graffiti that stood out to me at the bridge: FADE, and INER. Those didn’t have anything to do with an actual person. Unless—ugh, this is a morbid thought. But just, what if those words hadn’t been written in spray paint? They did seem dark. Brownish.

Meaning… man, I lost the thread here. But I need to figure this out. The more I think about it, the more these auras seem not very New Age at all. Whatever information I end up pulling from them is bound to be unpleasant.

Did see one purplish person today. No silvery. 

I think if I have to see one or the other, I prefer the silvery. Maybe because it was the color of my younger self. Whereas purple was the color of Lynne Samuelson, the color that inspired murderous assault.

I don't want to come across as a bigot, though. I'm sure the purples are very nice people, once you get to know them.

posted by Mark Huntley @ 9:17 PM

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