2002-10-02 - 9:15 p.m.

Today after work I went to pick up my glasses. I�d been wearing one contact for the past two days. With one contact the world is a flat plane, surrounded by a fog.

I was ashamed to wear the old glasses with the ancient prescription, the tortoise shell paint long since chipped away. I�d tossed them aside with so much old rubbish in creating the new me, the new me of several me�s ago.

But the eyes have been irritated lately. I would just put the contacts in, and one wouldn�t feel quite right. It would turn red, but I�d leave it there anyway. The rising sun seemed to burn me on the drive to work.

The doctor asked me if it was one eye or both, and I couldn�t remember. I hadn�t been noticing much. I�d been letting it go, like I eventually let everything go, let myself go until I feel I�ve sagged enough and have to snatch myself back up, until I must snap back into focus.

Irritations sneak up. The little piles of trash that collect around me. The low ceiling over my desk, hemming me in. The upcurled end of a rug that refuses to stay down. The vague feeling that I just don�t get it, that I haven�t been doing things right at all.

So I changed into sneakers and headed out for the eye doctor. It was a good day for a walk. A good time to start looking at things with new eyes.

-

The tide is turning on my street. The peace garden has been filled with concrete, the foundation of a brand-new condominium. Once it was an empty lot, and someone decided to plant a garden there and make it into a symbol. The garden flourished before it was sold to a developer. Then it filled with weeds until they tore it up and poured a foundation in its place. The wilderness has been beaten back.

Across the street is the future home of Starbucks, undeterred by the protesters who walked the streets slurring its name. I crossed over and peeked in. Today the storefront is dark, but the tables and chairs await, the prices posted neatly on the counter. I wonder if I will go there. Someday I will, I know, despite the supposed ill will. It will offer an empty seat for reading and writing. Perhaps some pretty girls will go there.

Seeing the brand-new Starbucks sign on the corner brings a strange sensation. It feels like a flag has been posted, claiming this territory for the machine. This corner will become one like so many other, with brand names and busy sidewalks, the wheels of corporate capitalism turning. The dark mystery of this corner, its otherworldy emptiness, its chaos, slips away.

These are the choices we make. Wilderness, chaos, freedom, terror on one side. Order, control, security, subjugation on the other. We choose our demons and we live with them.

As I marched down Lawrence under the long dark awning beside the subway shop, a gang of young girls came screeching across the street ahead of the oncoming traffic. They spilled out around me and forged ahead as I hung back and veered off to the edge of the sidewalk to let them pass. But I hung with them for a while, all the way down the long gray cemetery wall and halfway to the Sears where my new glasses were waiting, listening to them shriek ang giggle wildly all the way.

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