Story 3: Tube
We’re in a supermarket. It’s brightly lit, the shelves are well stocked with familiar goods, all bold and vying for attention. It’s your supermarket, where you go, if that’s easier. There’s a man feeling his way down an isle. He wears a grey pleather jacket and a black pair of trousers that would have once been appropriate business wear. His left hand is tracing the price tags as he progresses, his right hand is holding a basket. So far the basket contains one onion and he’s been here for a while.
From that description it’d be fair to assume the man is partially sighted or blind, but he’s neither, not by involuntary means. His head is wrapped in parcel tape, parting at the lips, for ease of speech. His whole head is covered in rotations of parcel tape, wads of hair jutting from beneath some sections. A cardboard tube; a foot and a half long clingfilm roll innard, extends from his right eye, taped into the construction like an antenna. It acts as a tiny sight hole, the only one he’s deemed necessary. Currently, to this man, the whole world exists at the furthest point of this tube, reduced to a small over-exposed disk. All visual stimulus filtered into a digestible one and a half centimeter circle. Vision in pill form, scanning the world one syllable at a time. Nuh… tell… ah... Nutella.
It’s not a convenient lifestyle choice, it’s often dependant on the good grace of strangers. When our man is in need of assistance he rotates his head until his tiny field of vision fills with the iconic green of a shop assistants uniform, then he walks towards it, he knows he’s arrived when everything turns black. It’s an unnerving thing to be on the receiving end of, especially the laboured process of him reading name badges. Re… yan… sh… Reyansh. It’s not a robust system either, he’s spent a while berating a pack of composting bags for being non-communicative.
He’s prone to distraction, so this is an intended solution to that, trimming down exterior busyness, really focusing on the task at hand. The act of doing this at all, was a distraction from doing his taxes. The plan is that once he’s built up to the level of discipline he considers appropriate, he’ll swap out the cardboard tube to something with a wider aperture, like a kitchen roll tube and so on until he resembles a dog with a scratch proof cone in the later stages.
That’s the intention. But currently he’s lying on his back having potted his eyeball on a lamppost, so we’ll see how that pans out.