Monday, December 29, 2008

sex and the city

I lost my reading glasses in the surf of Playa de la Cuesta, and came back to Mexico City to deal with the duality this introduces into my life. My real glasses are good for the middle distance and beyond, but they take a dim view of print, or the handling of small objects. So I can walk down the street with confidence, but put me in a bookstore and, peering through my glasses, I see all the print as black blotches, as though it had melted and run in the rain of my myopia. My simple solution was to find some reading glasses, but this proved harder than I imagined. In the U.S., you go into a drug store or a supermarket and there they are, the ancient mariner´s friends, on a rack. In Mexico City, this seems not to be the case. So I gave up, but today, wandering lonely as a cloud down a street in the Centro, I spotted reading glasses. I tried some on, attracting, inevitably, a salesperson who hovered around me, and to whom I had to explain, in a parody of baby Spanish that seems, on every outing, to get more and more incomprehensible to the people at whom I am aiming it, that I had lost my reading glasses and had no prescription. So he showed me some, and I bought a pair for 40 pesos that have turned out to be less than useful. However, as I was paying, I looked around the shop and realized it was a sex shop. Mexico is always surprising me. Perhaps the owners decided that the old story, that jerking off causes blindness, might be true, and provided the glasses as a service to old and faithful clients.

2 comments:

Newman said...

A nice story added to your erudite blog. Keep up the good work.

Do you have information about Valerie Vescovo. I learned, sadly, of her death but nothing of the circumstances. My heart is torn between wondering about her and whether it is unseemly to ask.

I hope you are well. Chris Hudson told me about Limited Inc.

Unknown said...

Newman, talk to me about that on my email = rgathman@netzero.net

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