What's up with The Dude's mythical eye-thing?
Like why doesn't he just get new glasses or whatever?
INTRODUCTION
I've been bald for a long time and get my hair(S) cut monthly with a number one electric hair clipper (short) so I don't usually have bad hair days, but I do have bad eye days.
Actually my eyes (like the rest of me) are basically very healthy for a Dudist of my somewhat advanced age.
I'm nearsighted and have worn glasses since I was thirteen years old. I consider them to be a part of my face, perhaps one of my best features. I have glasses for distance viewing and also a pair of reading glasses, but usually I read without glasses. It seems to confuse people and I consider that to be a good thing insofar as it distracts them from their delusions.
The thing is that my eyes are protruding, bulging, bugging-out! Particularly my left eye. It is bugged-out like one of those weird goldfish you've probably seen. Or like a cartoon character or animation where someone has held their breathe for too long.
As I like to say, sure I'm funny, but looks aren't everything! And I do get a lot of funny looks, not only because my left eye is bugging-out, but also because I am often closing one eye or the other. The upside of this is that people remember me and what I look like, but the downside is that it is unattractive, unusual (not normal) and even kind of creepy (that part is pretty cool, so as you can plainly see… like everything else there are some good points and some not-so-good ones).
Sometimes people jump to the erroneous conclusion that I am whacked-out on drugs or otherwise off-my-rocker. While it may be true that I am off-my-rocker, I can assure you that I come by that honestly. I can also assure you (I've been told) that drugs don't make your eyes bug-out, it only seems that way until they wear-off.
Although each of my eyes are healthy, they just don't work well together as a coordinated team and consequently I walk around a lot of the time with one eye closed because I suffer from double-vision. As a practical matter double-vision is an easy thing to compensate for… you either close the left eye or close the right eye and the double-vision is gone… poof, just like that. The double-vision thing has only been happening for a few years now. One day i woke up and my left eye was bugged out. Not a such a nice thing to wake-up to, but it still works just fine and its the one I use to look through the viewfinder of my camera.
Why like this?
Why do The Dude's eyes BUG OUT mythically like that?
I have a hyper-thyroid condition called Grave's Disease, which was diagnosed when I was about fourty years old. Its the same disease that Marty Feldman,
the famous bug-eyed British actor and comedian had. Remember him as Igor in Young Frankenstein?
Grave's Disease is simply an overactive thyroid gland caused by very poorly understood defects or dysfunctions in the mind-boggling complexity of the human auto-immune system.
The thyroid is a critical component of normal metabolic functions. Some pretty important stuff.
When you have Graves Disease, for unknown reasons, the auto-immune system causes the thyroid to enlarge and/or otherwise operate overtime at an unhealthful accelerated or hyper-level, secreting much more of the various hormones and other arcane endocrinological juices than it ought to. This results in a variety of symptoms and other consequences because the thyroid is a major component of the mechanisms that control metabolism.
When your thyroid is overactive (hyper)…
"it both overstimulates metabolism and exacerbates the effect of the sympathetic nervous system, causing "speeding up" of various body systems and symptoms resembling an overdose of epinephrine (adrenaline). These include fast heart beat and symptoms of palpitations, nervous system tremor and anxiety symptoms." - from the the Wikipedia article about hyperthyroidism.
Although there really is not much known about how why this happens to only some people, the good news is that it is a relatively simple matter to control (for the most part). with medication.
Grave's Disease is one of many conditions known as auto-immune system diseases. A lot of people (confused and uninformed) hear this and immediately think of HIV and AIDS, but auto-immune system diseases having nothing at all to do with HIV or AIDS and fortunately I do not have HIV or AIDS and my immune system, with the exception of my thyroid gland, is quite healthy and robust, which comes in quite handily when you live in a developing country like Cambodia.
So I take a couple of little white pills everyday that are essentially thyroid poison. This medication slows down the overactive thyroid and at just the right dosage it effectively cripples the gland into operating at a normal rate, rather than at the accelerated rate that causes a wide variety of generally undesirable symptoms and problems.
The bad news is that, despite my daily doses of a generally effective medication for my condition, the disease still causes – but only in some people – other symptoms and problems that are not-at-all well understood or easy to predict, manage or control. Bummer.
One of the effects of Graves Disease that is not controllable with medication is a swelling of the fatty tissue behind and beneath the eyeball in the eye socket. It is the swelling of this tissue that causes my eyes to bulge and that moves them out of alignment and off their normal axis relative to each other, which results in that pesky and irritating double-vision problem. The problem is further exacerbated by normal eye muscle degradation associated with age. Talk about "hitting you where it hurts" while you're already down… ouch!
My eye condition is known as Graves Ophthalmopathy and is specifically called Exophthalmus. Unfortunately "medical science" knows almost nothing about why and how this happens. Nor do they know how to reliably control and manage it effectively for those of us who are afflicted with this frustrating and troublesome condition. Life is full of mystery, that's for sure.
Exophthalmus only occurs is a small percentage of people with Graves Disease and it occurs even when all or most other symptoms are corrected with medication. Cigarette smoking is suspected of aggravating the problem, but quitting smoking may not have any effect at all on the condition.
The degree to which my eyes, especially my left eye, are bulging and the extent to which it causes mild or severe double-vision and other discomfort is unstable and constantly changing, even from one day to the next… but even on a pretty good day my night-vision is extremely poor and when you combine that with double-vision and hyper-sensitivity to light it can be very uncomfortable (physically and mentally) for me to go out at night.
So its a good thing that – since I'm in my early 50's – I just really don't want to go out to bars and clubs very often anyway. You know, a dude just doesn't want to do all the same things he did in his 20's, 30's and 40's. That's true.
I bump into things now even more than I used to! With only one eye being used at a time you totally lose depth-perception and WHAM… no 3D, only 2D, which of course is exactly one-third less D. That's a lot of D really when you think about it. On the other hand, just try to imagine what it would be like to lose height-perception. I'll bet that would be a lot harder to compensate for.
I also have fairly limited peripheral vision on my left side, again a combination of that eye's extra-jumbo bulge and the vagaries and hazards of the all-too-quick journey towards… old age (gasp).
Trust me and mark my words… the Dude is far, far, far away from the infirmities of old age. Not that I don't have what sometimes seems like an onslaught of ailments that come and go without much rhyme or reason. All the more ammo in the Dude's bag of personal rationalizations, delusions and misapprehensions that can be whipped out on a moment's notice to justify all manner of coping mechanisms i.e. self-medication, fantasy, neurosis, idiocy and even the sheer lunacy of contentment. Life's a mysterious bitch… don't let the bastards wear you down.
Again I am quite fortunate because even before I had to give up a third of my D on the outward-facing domain of external perception, I had made it a point in my life to steadily expand the levels of D in the inward-facing domain of internal thought, perception and the astoundingly vast, growing and mind-blowing space of ever-expanding consciousness. It is funny – isn't it? – the symmetrical stranger-than-fiction way that these things somehow work out to maintain some semblance of balance and equilibrium. Life is full of mystery… and its a bitch too (did I already mention that?).
So there you go.
Now you not only know about the real low-down skinny on the whole epic mythicaldude eye phenomenon, but – if you followed even a few of the links – I'll bet you learned a lot more than you ever knew about your auto-immune system, glands, hormones and other stuff that you probably still aren't very interested in. Who knows… maybe someday it'll prove to be useful if you are in some sort of biology trivia competition. Maybe not.
But what about photography? We thought you were a photographer.
No problem. I shoot photos all the time and I almost always use my left eye to look through the viewfinder.
Like I said, each of my eyes are basically healthy and in good operating condition (like the rest of me), they just don't work well as a team. The real impact of that is loss of depth perception which really only affects my ability to ambulate as accurately as I used to.
In fact, photographers are highly adapted and accustomed to looking at the world with one eye closed and the other peering through the viewfinder.
Finally, and you'll do very well indeed to remember this… like so many fine and wondrous things in life, the value of a photograph (like the value of a person) lies not in how it looks, but rather in how it conducts itself and how it makes you feel.
Photos are like people. They're all different. One day one of them will piss you off big-time and the next day they will just as unexpectedly open your mind's eye, make you smile, soothe your aching heart and change your world forever… and make you feel the love. Then again sometimes you just don't understand them at all.
So there you go.
