Seeing Song #1: That's Nash, Not Cash

In 2004 I went on a retreat co-led by Marc Grossman, a functional optometrist who also practices Chinese medicine. Everyone at the retreat had some sort of visual condition (mostly presbyopia) that they wanted to alleviate, and my own cone dystrophy was perhaps the most severe condition in the room, even though I was the youngest person there. I was also the only male, aside from the facilitators.

Over the course of the week we did eye exercises, some meditating and journaling, and practiced a daily yoga sequence designed to stimulate meridians associated with vision. At week's end everyone was eager to receive Dr. Grossman's herbal and dietary prescriptions tailored to our specific eye troubles. But the moment that brought the greatest elation was when he put on a CD and this song played:


I love Johnny Nash's original version because it gradually introduces dissonant elements that build tension in an otherwise "everything-is-just-hunky-dory" type song: An out-of-tune accordion kicks in on the second verse, a Moog synthesizer takes over the bridge, and lyrics about blue skies shift into foreboding minor keys because we know that life's not really gonna be all bright and sunshiny every day, right? But we can hope, just like a roomful of middle-aged ladies who smile and dance along at a yoga studio in the Berkshires, ready to drive back to Long Island, to their homes and their husbands, maybe to try on their miracle cures.

PS: I absolutely recommend taking a workshop with Marc, and I have lots to say about functional optometry, acupuncture, herbal medicine and yoga as methods for improving vision. If you're curious, leave me a comment below.

Dumb Waiter

This might be a little gruesome. Read at your own risk.

I grew up in a tough neighborhood. I was a bookish, bespectacled kid in a school full of jocks. Walking home without torment from bullies was rare. And gym class was like an hour-long hazing ritual for a club that I'd never be admitted to.

There was one bully in particular who did more than just call me a "four-eyed goon" like so many other kids. This guy actually targeted me for being nearsighted. He got so much delight in walking right up to me at the cafeteria, in hallways, out on the sports field and around our neighborhood, and then he'd shout in my face, "MORGAN! CAN YOU SEE ME?!?" There was usually some spittle involved.

This persisted past grade school and well into high school. And then the really gruesome thing that I warned you about happened. You can stop reading now, if you want to.

He had a job working in this yuppie market in our hometown. At the end of the day, they'd transport prepared foods to a basement fridge from the main floor via a dumbwaiter. One day this kid who'd bullied me for years was high at work (on marijuana, in case you're curious) and he'd called for the dumbwaiter.

Maybe it seemed to be taking a long time to arrive, maybe he was just goofing with his friends, and for kicks he stuck his head into the dumbwaiter shaft and looked up to see what was holding it up.

That's when the dumbwaiter came down and crushed his head.

I never wished this to happen to anyone who has ever bullied me before of since. Yet I felt guilty, as if I had wished it and then it actually happened. Fact is, I never really thought about this particular kid until he was up in my face, yelling at me to ridicule my nearsightedness, and now I felt guilty for not thinking about him. And then he was gone. And then I did think about him. I can still hear his loud voice, smell his adolescent breath, and feel his saliva spattering against my face.

And yes, I could see him.

Playing With Matches

This winter my mom sent me 8 pairs of socks, all the same brand, and each pair is a different color. I love these socks, but every time I do laundry, pairing each sock up with its mate can be trying for the cone-deficient. Maybe you can help:

Leave your colorful insights in the comments below. 

(And thanks mom.)

Double Dissed

I just spent a few days with laryngitis. At its worst, I couldn't speak at all, and so I went out with a stack of index cards and a Sharpie in my pocket. Whenever someone said "hi" to me, I held up the first card, which read, "I have laryngitis." If they wanted to converse more, I could write notes on the index cards.

It was interesting navigating the world with two disabilities, one chronic that I keep less visible (having low vision) and one temporary that I chose to make visible (not being able to speak). And once we broke the ice, laryngitis had its perks. People found communicating with me to be interesting and entertaining, and I played this up, making it into something of a performance. In the park, someone offered to buy me sorbet, and then the guy selling it refused to take any money for it. When "talking" to my friend who works with visually impaired people, I wrote on a card, "We're all temporarily abled," and then she told me that this laryngitis might be more of an ability than a disability for me because I could take my time to say what I wanted to say, draw pictures, and then have a record of that correspondence.

On the way home from my night out as a laryngite, I gave out some of these cards to people, odd anthropoetic documents of my conversations with others. When the trolley reached my stop, I rang the bell, but the driver shut the doors before I could get off. I called out, "Rear door!" but he couldn't hear me because at the end of the day, I had no voice.

What Would Owen Meany Do?

As anyone who's read A Prayer for Owen Meany knows, absorbing lots of text in all capital letters can be intense. John Irving was clearly aware of this when he wrote that novel in 1989. Irving used all caps to augment everything spoken or written by Owen Meany, a precocious adolescent whose voice and stature set him apart from everyone else in the book. Could Irving have known that, just a few years later, writing in ALL CAPS would become a major faux pas on this newfangled thing called The Internet? That ALL CAPS would signify the text equivalent of shouting and even brand its purveyors as wingnutty wackos whose very words and ideas were to be ignored altogether? Reading Owen Meany pre- and post-Internet are two very different experiences to be sure, and if you, dear reader, are seeing these words online, I regret to inform you, that it's too late to undergo the former: you've already been corrupted.

Etiquette aside, there are also design considerations that make a case against using all caps. The user experience blog UX Movement explains how contrast is an important factor in presenting blocks of text, not just in size, font and color, but also in s h a p e. Take the word, "shape" and the word "style" each printed in three formats here:

shape          style

Shape          Style

  SHAPE          STYLE

Notice how the word in ALL CAPS stand out from those in lowercase or Title Case, but not from each other. UX Movement's article points out that words consisting of mostly lowercase letters have greater variance in terms of shape because some of the letters possess ascenders (b, d, f, h, i, k, l and t), descenders (g, p, q, and y) or bother (j) that make whole words of similar length more identifiable from each other, whereas words in ALL CAPS tend to form a more uniform, rectangular shape, as in the words SHAPE and STYLE.

But what about readers who have low vision? As a person with low vision, I type in standard English sentence case, but my handwriting is rarely contains any lowercase letters. Instead, I print in all caps as I was taught in drafting and cartooning classes I attended in 8th and 9th grade. My handwriting, at its best, looks like something you'd see in a high-caliber comic book or on an architectural blueprint. I do this because, for me, it's easier to see. Online and in printed publications I would never type in all caps, and I find reading sentences in all caps to be as stressful as when someone is physically shouting at me.

So, what would Owen Meany do had he lived in the Information Age instead of the Cold War Era in which Irving set his book? Would Meany have relented, toned down his voice and conformed to the conventions of etiquette and design dictated by Internet 101? And what does that say about those of us who must occasionally defy these conventions for the sake of accessibility? I'll touch on that in a future post about all caps—STAY TUNED.

Showing Cones

The past two weeks have been filled with rehearsals and performances for the piece that this blog is building toward.

I showed a 10-minute bit of CONES (or something related to it) as part of an event curated by Almanac at Mascher Space two weeks ago. Tonight and tomorrow I perform something completely different. If you're in Philly, come see it, April 6+7 at the Rotunda, opening for a devised theatre group from New Zealand. Here's the info on the Medium Theatre Company website, and here's where you can RSVP via Facebook.

More showings of CONES  are in the works for May and June, before our run at the SoLow Festival. Till then, there's plenty of material on this blog for you to interact with. Enjoy it!

Evicted in New Haven

I'm remembering this time several years ago when a friend and I were staying in New Haven for a training. A friend of a friend offered his place to us. He was a super nice MFA student who wasn't home much and had these big couches that we could sleep on. After our first night, we headed to the training for the morning and then came back to his apartment to make lunch—noodles and kimchi I think it was. We cleaned up and returned to the training. That afternoon, our host left a message on my voicemail, a really angry message accusing us of making a mess in his kitchen, and saying that we can no longer stay there. When we went back to the apartment to get our stuff, I saw what I hadn't seen before: that some bits o shredded carrot were around the stove, and that's what he was so mad about.

I can understand this. I've let people that I didn't really know stay in my house, and sometimes it was great, sometimes it wasn't. I think if this friend of a friend had known me previously that the situation would've been okay, but there's another factor at play here that makes me wonder: What if he'd just met me but I'd explained to him that I can't see so well? Would he have forgiven me for the mess that I left? Or would he have reacted the same way? In which versions of the story does discrimination happen? Or entitlement? And did I, in fact, tell him that I'm visually impaired? Did our mutual friend? This was several years ago, so I can't recall. 

In the end we crashed with these young punk rockers, five of them who lived in a three-bedroom apartment. We slept on their back porch and they helped me fix my bike. We did lots of cooking and cleaning there, and when we left, the place was tidier than it had been before we arrived.