I interrupt this unannounced and unplanned hiatus from blogging to bring you the following public service announcement and tale of my own jackassery.

On Wednesday evening, I purchased the following two products:

I bought the first product because the fall of man works itself out most violently in my flesh by causing my entire body to respond to the spring air with extreme prejudice. This takes many forms, but one of the least pleasant is, to quote the box, "itching and burning discomfort" of my eyes.

I bought the second product because I’ve spent the last few days feeling like Cosmo Kramer in the Seinfeld finale. I had never used any kind of product to try to remove fluid from my ears, but it seemed the thing to do.

Late Wednesday evening, I noticed I had set the two bottles, which look a lot alike, next to each other on my bathroom counter. Ever vigilant to avoid inflicting bodily injury on myself, I decided I should separate the two to avoid any unfortunate mishaps from a mix-up.

On Thursday, the allergy curse was in full force. After returning from an evening at the park with my family and some friends, I eagerly made my way to the bathroom to free my eyeballs from the oppression of contact lenses and to bathe them in this:

As I’m sure you’ve already guessed, I instead doused my right eyeball with this:

Despite intentionally separating the two, I had a momentary lapse in memory with respect to which bottle I’d left in the bathroom and which I had put elsewhere. Add to that impaired vision, both from not having my contacts in and from the "itching and burning discomfort," and you get something like this:

(not my actual eye)

Auro-Dri is 95% isopropyl alcohol (and I assume the other 5% is liquid fire). I felt like I actually had set my eyeball on fire, and I was a convulsing, spitting, snotting mess, completely discombobulated and confused. As I threw my face into the sink in an effort to get as much water into my eye as possible, it took me several seconds to understand what I had done. Once I did, I really feared for a moment that I might have done irreparable damage to my eye. I instantly thought of the kid with a glass eye who once showed up to a youth group event at my church when I was a teenager. He chased folks around with his eye in his hand. I’m not kidding. That guy pulled an uncapped bottle of bleach down onto his face and lost an eye in the process. And there he was, standing in my bathroom taunting me with his slimy fake eye as I wondered if I had doomed myself to a similar fate.

The good news is that a little trip to google assured me that there was only a slight chance of any permanent damage to my cornea. The better news is Amy had some vicodin handy from her recent back injury, which was the only thing that made blinking or closing my eye tolerable for an hour or so.  The bad news is that I, the salutatorian of the Crane High School Class of 1993, actually did this.