Cranial Gunk

There’s a curious lyric right after the famous opening lines of the Talking Heads song, “Once In A Lifetime.”

Letting the days go by, let the water hold me down…

It’s curious because when you think of “letting the days go by,” you think of “going with the flow,” you think of “floating.”

This lyric seems to say, “Allow yourself to drown.”

Letting the days go by, let the water hold me down. Letting the days go by, water flowing underground. Into the blue again, after the money’s gone. Once in a lifetime, water flowing underground.

:As written out in Frank Olinsky and the Talking Heads’ What the Songs Look Like.

I think I’ve said all I’ve want to say about 9/11. I’ve told you about the night before. The heavy rain and the fight I had with my live-in girlfriend (who would become my wife and the mother of my first child). On the day of the attack, it was cool and sunny. A beautiful day. My girlfriend and I weren’t arguing anymore. We made plans for lunch.

When we were told it was a plane – a plane had flown into the World Trade Towers — we thought it was a Cessna, one of those little private planes flown by amateur airmen. Just a few weeks before Aaliyah had died in a Cessna crash in the Bahamas. We never imagined that it was a commercial airliner that hit the Tower. We never imagined another would follow soon after. And we never imagined it would all be premeditated. 

A neighbor told us that one of the Towers had fallen. We looked downtown to where the Trade Center Towers were visible over the horizon and saw nothing but a column of smoke. I couldn’t believe it. Those Towers couldn’t be broken. It was a trick of light and smoke. They wouldn’t fall.

But we watched the devastation on TV. We had no phone. We couldn’t reach anyone. We just watched the second Tower fall over and over again. My girlfriend cried.

Same as it ever was…

Same as it ever was…

Same as it ever was…

Same as it ever was…

That’s the other refrain from “Once In A Lifetime.”

After the smoke had cleared there was a big push by Mayor Giuliani and other city officials to get back to “business as usual.” I was eager to do so too. We all grieve differently.  Some like to hid in corners, letting the sorrow wash over them and then run off. Others like me need to keep moving, distancing themselves from the Tuesday the Towers fell as far as possible.

I was going to have a family now. The Saturday after the Towers fell, my girlfriend told me she was pregnant. We got married and prepared a home for our child. My coworkers wanted to celebrate but I said, No. I didn’t want to attract bad luck by celebrating so soon after the tragedy. In hindsight, I should have said, Yes. Everyone seemed hungry to celebrate something. I needed something to celebrate too but was too timid, the weight of the tragedy compounded by the superstition surrounding death and the unburied (Wandering Ghosts). 

Chee Wang Ng addresses the Chinese aversion to “death talk” and “ghosts” in his rice bowl installation: The depiction of bowl of rice with the tabooed placement of chopsticks stuck straight into the mound. I had an opportunity to speak with him at a reception for his installation in the Manhattan Borough President’s office. 

Several candles on a low circular table like a coffee table or a side table, draped in a red tablecloth, topped by a sculpted bowl of white rice impaled by two enormous chopsticks. It was interesting to listen to his rationale for the choice of objects and their placement. And their size. If you were not paying attention, you might easily walk past the installation. Chee effectively explained his rationale for this: It is not a celebration or something we should single out and promote. It is something to be pondered, low key, and reverent.

It was the year after the Towers fell that shirts depicting the Towers still standing or smoking became popular. Accompanying the images,  the words “Always Remember” or “Never Forget” were written.

But what exactly don’t “they” want me to forget? The hysteria that followed after – Guantanamo, the racism, and the hate? Or the images of droves of scared and confused people holding onto each other (to assist in support and for strength), helping each other through the toxic cloud? 

In the version of “Once In A Lifetime” they perform in their concert film, Stop Making Sense, they include the verse:

Time isn’t holding us, time isn’t after us

Time isn’t holding us, time doesn’t hold you back

Time isn’t holding us, time isn’t after us

Time isn’t holding us

Resilience.

That’s the word that used over and over again from the 911memorial.org site to the site for the National Association for School Psychologists (NASP) when the conversation is about speaking to children about the 9/11 tragedy. I tell my children that sometimes people want what they want so bad that they don’t care who they hurt to get what they want. I tell them to take care not to become one of these people.

I tell them sometimes you lose more than you gain when you win.

I tell them everyone is different even when everyone else says they are all the same.

I tell them not to give up so quickly on broken objects, sometimes the pieces can be brought together and put together into something just as great.

I was OK with it even with my inner- Tiger Mom (the angry condescending voice in my head that berates and second guesses every action I take) telling me: “You’ll be blind! And then you’ll be a burden to your family! You better hope they kill you! At least then your family can collect the insurance! Stupid!” (TIger Mom’s don’t speak, they roar!)

I was OK with it until they showed me the video about the risks of having the PRK operation done. And then I made the mistake of watching a YouTube video of the operation; mistakenly thinking it would calm me if I knew what would go on.

PRK stands for Photorefractive Keratectomy. It is like LASIK in that it is surgery that uses laser technology to manipulate the shape of the eye. The major difference between the two is that PRK removes the entire layer of skin over the cornea, while LASIK creates a flap in the skin over the cornea. In my case, the goal of PRK was to flatten my cornea to reduce my myopia.

I remember over a decade ago, standing by a coworker’s desk, talking with her about LASIK surgery and how we both could really go for it, but how right then and there the fear of it outweighed the benefits. Over the recent years, new coworkers and friends of friends have had it done and have raved about the results. Over the past six months, I have been feeling like I needed a new prescription (again? Didn’t I just get a new one?) It was now time that I just did it.

The physical operation felt like just a few minutes. The doctor kept telling me to look at the blinking light, I was afraid to tell him that my vision was so bad that there was really no light for me to look at – just a big flashing red and green blur. I just laid perfectly still and stared straight ahead; which was the right thing to do because the doctor rhythmically mumbled, “Uh Huh… Good… stare at the light…” and then it was over.

The first hour with my newly lasered eyes was wonderful. I was infatuated with the fact that I could see without my glasses. The following 48 hours, however, are ones I am glad are behind me. My eyes were tearing so much that at one point in the night, I had to remove the safety goggles they had given me to sleep in and pour the tears out of them! Thankfully the pain never got over having a cat hair stuck underneath your contact lens.

The following 48 hours was like pre-operation mornings. Early hours trudging to the bathroom without needing my glasses because I had learned what the soft-rounded colored shadows represented. The irrational frustration set in during the afternoons when all the things I do on the weekends remain undone because I can not see enough to read a computer screen or my cell phone. I can not read a book and the soft, colored morning shadows are now on the TV. The visible world is now a blur.

I can’t help my mind from wandering into the Night Gallery (the show Rod Serling created after The Twilight Zone); the episode in the pilot where Joan Crawford gets Tom Bosley’s eyes. Fate plays a trick on her. Her vision is restored in the middle of a black out. I mind kept whispering “11 hours… 11 hours…”

When the doctor removed the contacts they used as bandages after the operation, I have to admit I felt a tinge of Gallery’s Crawford come on. After 48 hours of fuzzy vision, my eyesight had finally cleared. I was able to see clearly again. My vision was as good as it had been with my glasses. And while I did have more than 11 hours, the hours following the removal of the contacts, I did feel (if even for a little while) like Night Gallery’s Joan Crawford.

If not the Night Gallery, The Eye (Not the Jessica Alba remake, the Pang Brother’s original). I don’t see ghosts but it is interesting to think along the terms of Joyce; who I have been told because of his atrocious eyesight described things by sound and color, giving his writing a unique and poetic perspective.

In Araby he paints a picture of a busy street with ambient sound:

Her image accompanied me even in places the most hostile to romance. On Saturday evenings when my aunt went marketing I had to go to carry some of the parcels. We walked through the flaring streets, jostled by drunken men and bargaining women, amid the curses of labourers, the shrill litanies of shop-boys who stood on guard by the barrels of pigs’ cheeks, the nasal chanting of street-singers, who sang a come-all-you about O’Donovan Rossa, or a ballad about the troubles in our native land.

In The Eye, Ah Mun, who was born blind, receives a cornea transplant that successfully provides her with vision for the first time. The automaticity of vision in the morning is something the sighted seem to forsake. From what I remember, the movie didn’t make a very big deal about that (or at least I felt the filmmakers didn’t make a big enough deal about it). Imagine the movie’s meaning if Ah Mun, who can finally see, thinks the things she sees are normal. I mean what does she have to compare her sighted experience to? It’s the first time she can see!

Seeing without my glasses is still new to me. My brain hasn’t really acknowledged that I am seeing without the help of something else. My return to blurred vision (with the removal of the “bandage contacts”) perpetuates the blindness in my head.

The doctor assures me this is a temporary state; a part of my recovery. I hope I have the vision I had on the best day of wearing my contact bandages. Not that I would trade my new sightedness to return to my days of spectacles or contact care, but I do wonder what I will miss when I eventually grow accustomed to the visible world.