The Narcissan Eye-Gouger

There was a guy staring at himself in my workplace's bathroom mirror today. I'm not sure why. I think he might have been applying water to his mustache, but he was mostly staring. I tried not to examine the spectacle, so I can't be sure. I can only say it was deeply unsettling. Incomprehensible.

You see, as a person who can't abide his own soul-shattering stare, I avoid mirrors. I can't do it. I just can't stand to look at myself. It's horrifying.

And no, I'm not, to the best of my knowledge, hideously ugly. Neither am I guilty of such heinous misdeeds that what I see in the windows to my soul terrifies me. It's just that looking into one's own eyes seems fundamentally...Wrong.

Our eyes are placed where they are in our body so that they can see everything but themselves. Creating and using devices in such a way as to pervert that status quo is, frankly, disturbing. If someone placed a helmet apparatus on you that would safely extract your eyeballs and point them at one another, how would you actually take the procedure? Badly, I think. You would scream and vomit and barely be able to remain sane. Just seeing this happen to someone else might be enough to drive you mad.

And sure, I understand that this is a bogus comparison, as the majority of mirrors don't actually modify your physical body, but I'm trying to translate my perceptions here.

So keep that image in your head (so to speak): someone's eyes being pulled out of their head and pointed at each other, cords still trailing back into open sockets. How do you feel? Uncomfortable? Disturbed? Disgusted? Generally yucked-out? I understand. It's how I feel when I see someone looking at themselves in the mirror. And that's without considering the whole vanity issue. Imagine someone in such an eye-extractor rubbing at their teeth and patting at their hair. Truly unpleasant.

I do allow that it may be easier to use a mirror to burst facial pustules or remove dangling bits of meat from your beard, but for heaven's sake, stop staring at yourselves. It freaks the rest of us out.

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[the wife]

I shut the bathroom door when I engage in my meditative self-stares so I don't have to hear his dry heaving.