I've been told I'm smart all my life but the truth is that I am a total idiot sometimes. In the past year, I have spent many white man dollars upgrading the visual quality of the technical components in my house. I bought an HD-TV, an XBOX 360, got HD cable with an HD DVR and an HD-DVD player.

All the while I've let my eyes go to shit.

I wear contact lenses, the two week kind. And while I take them out each night; I only change them about once every three to four months. Well, after a month or so, bacteria builds up on the lenses and its like putting a plastic cess pool in your eye every day.

I've noted a consistent degradation of my visual quality over the past year and its because my corneas were acutely inflammed. They were so bad that the optomotrist couldn't even complete the eye exam and had to prescribe me expensive steroid/antibiotic drops to be administered four time a day until next week.

I've spent hundreds on upgrading technology and let the visual biology of my own body sink into poverty. See what I mean? Dumb.

But while waiting for my eye exam, the woman next to me asked me what the best novel I ever read was. People ask me weird literary shit like this all the time. I guess I look like a novel reader. There are people who read far more and far less than I do and most of my reading is supplemented using audio books on CD in the car on my morning commute.

But I had an answer for her--Mother Night by Kurt Vonnegut. Here's the hook, as they say in the publishing business:

An American spy living and working in Nazi Germany becomes a radio talk show host who communicates his state-stolen secrets to the Allied Forces through anti-semitic rants over the radio which fuels the German fervor to carry out the most despicable mass murder in human history. So, while the secrets he was able to smuggle out were invaluable in helping the Allies win the war; doing so came at an enormous price.

You can do far worse than reading Vonnegut--like letting your eyes go to shit while you spend hundreds on new technology to help you see the world better through your television.

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