THE EYES HAVE IT

So I'm laying in bed minding my own business and about 3:00 AM I am attacked in my right eye by a rogue eyelash. What else could it possibly be? I'm not laying under a car working on a rusty exhaust system. I'm not working on a crappy oil furnace that exploded in my face and sent me on an ambulance ride. I'm not riding a motorcycle without the good sense to wear eye protection. I'm just laying in bed with my peepers closed tight in blissful sleep.

I assumed it was the eyelash because unlike most foreign objects that invade the delicate world of human optics, the eyebrows seems to always get stuck on the eyelid not the eyeball, making it a pain in the ass to evict.

It started out being a minor nuisance at 3:00 AM, by 6:00 AM it was a full-fledged nightmare of non-emotional tears. This was not the first time I suffered an eye attack in the middle of the night.

And it sure as hell was not the worst.

I may have been 18 or so and still living with he folks, about 3:00 AM I awoke to feeling of being sandblasted in both eyes with shards of hot glass soaked in battery acid followed by a clawing frenzy by a heard of ill tempered rabid kitties. It hurt.

It hurt to have my eyelids touching my eyeballs, it hurt even worse to open my eyes and expose them to the air. I was effectively blind. I got out of bed and was seeking aid while bumping into walls and tripping over unknown objects. "Mommy Daddy help me!" I finally made enough ruckus and woke up my parents. I had no clue what was causing this incredible pain, dad started quizzing me about what sort of work I had done on the job that day. I worked at Arvin's muffler factory in the evening shift at the time. That night I had been shifted from my usual line and was running an auto welder, this required mounting a muffler assembly on a machine and stepping on a pedal that mig welded both ends at once. The eye protection was not a regular welders mask, it was a green tinted face shield. Of course you are not supposed to look at the contraption when it welds but if you've ever working on a factory line you know how mind numbing line work is and sometimes you get out of sequence. That how people chop off fingers and such.

As I told dad I had been running this welder he said something like, "you dumbass kid, you got welders-flash." It's like a severe sunburn of the eyes. 

Between dad's home remedies and generous amounts of whatever prescription drugs they had on hand I got through that agonizing night.

He next morning my bloodshot eyes looked like Teddy Kennedy did the morning after he drowned the women he was trying to screw then left the scene of the crime so he could sober up and pay off the cops with his dads ill-gotten gains from bootlegging and stock manipulation. Whew! I had to get that out.

Anyway fast-forward to last night, after several attempts to expel this eyelash from hell I gave up on sleeping and sat up in the living room and tried to old pulling the top eyelid down over the bottom eyelid in hopes of scraping the lash off. I had tried this method for the last three hours to no avail but his time the lash finally gave in and like magic it was gone!

As I settled in the chair with a cup of coffee and my Ipad, I picked up my spectacles and as I raised them to my face i saw on the inside of the right lense another eyelash!

What the hell? Was this some sort of lash conspriacy? Was my eyelash going bald? Or did the rogue mutant eyelash from hell make its way to my glasses to wreak havoc once more?

What ever the case, you can be sure I will be sleeping with one eye open tonight.