Monday morning blues

Somehow—through alcohol, caffeine, spite, and whatever cosmic clerical error keeps me alive—we’ve stumbled into another Monday.

Last Friday, as I was packing for my west Texas pilgrimage (a family reunion disguised as a sanctioned psychological experiment), my eye doctor—the surgeon herself, high priestess of scalpels and doom—calls me directly. And let’s be clear: when the doctor calls instead of some chirpy nurse, you should already be sitting down, or at least leaning against something sturdy and not hallucinating.

She tells me she pulled a favor, a beautiful little back-alley medical favor, and got the pathologist to take a secret peek at my biopsy. The official results are still somewhere in the bureaucratic digestive tract, but the fat lady didn’t just sing—she delivered a full Broadway finale, dropped the mic, and walked offstage. In other words: an eviction notice for that rat bastard charlie, the squatter in my eye, is about ready to be slapped on the front door.

And naturally, because the universe enjoys seasoning the stew of misery, turns out I don’t qualify for the drug study. Something about parameters, criteria, planetary alignment—who the hell knows. The study itself is still 45 days away, and according to my doctor, waiting that long would be “inadvisable,” which is medical code for Why tempt fate when fate is already circling overhead with a bottle of bourbon and a hunting knife? She’s the expert. I’m just the host body in this parasitic buddy comedy. I don’t argue.

She says she can hand me off to a more local eye mechanic—some regional technician of the ocular dark arts—to take it from here. Green light. Smash the pedal. Off we go.

Then, in a burst of unsettling efficiency, the BSW eye clinic calls and schedules me for Monday. Same-day service, practically. I didn’t know whether to be impressed or terrified. So I had the whole weekend to marinate, to sit in my dimly lit corner thinking about the upcoming “consultation,” which, as I write this, is now roughly two hours away—looming like a hungover coyote sniffing around my campsite.

Not that there’s much to consult about. I already know what’s coming. This is just the prelude where they politely explain how soon they can haul me into the surgical abattoir and carve out the traitorous chunk of organic real estate that’s harboring Charlie. Time will tell, of course. It always does. Usually with a smirk.

And here’s the cruel punchline: as much as I despise that rat bastard, I’m weirdly fond of the eye he’s colonized. My shooting eye. My good window into the madness of the world. But this isn’t a negotiation. It’s an execution.

The evil eye must go. Rat bastard charlie must die. And with any luck, the rest of me will limp away to fight another Monday.

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