You know, whenever things are going badly for me, I think about one thing: Having my eyeball ripped out by a hook.

I know, I know. Everyone thinks about that all the time. I'm not breaking any new ground here.

But I remember seeing some teevee show when I was a kid, and it was about eye injuries. There was a guy on who had only one eye, because when he was a child he was swinging a little chain (with a hook on it) around, and he pulled out his own eye. On the same program, they showed real eye surgery, and in one shot the doctor was holding a guy's whole entire eye in his hand.

What does it mean? I don't know. It does make me question the motives of teevee stations, to be showing that sort of thing*. I mean who, watching that, is not going to get the willies? I'm shuddering right now just remembering it.

Also, when I think about my eyeball getting ripped out by a hook, I also think about the movie "The Fog", that I must have seen around the same time, in which lumbering ghosts of sailors, apparently bored with sailing around in the fog all the time, decide to rip out people's throats with a big hook.

That would probably be worse. If you were given a choice between having your eyeball ripped out with a hook, and your throat ripped out with a hook, could you make that kind of decision? That's what I'm really getting at here.



*There was a time, a few years back, when it seemed like I couldn't switch on the teevee without seeing somebody's leg cut open or an appendectomy or tracheotomy or something. This trend seems to be declining, which is a great relief to me, because I eat a lot of tomato-based sauces.