Today I was subjected to the devilish machines of good vision and clean ocular living. Getting contact lenses is a bizarre trial which starts when you are forced to look into a monopticon with a little blurry farmhouse and doesn't end until an imperious woman in navy scrubs repeatedly jabs her fingers into your eye. "Ow," I say. "Are you experiencing discomfort?" she asks. But her back is already turned and she's leafing through my file.

However. I've passed all the initial tests and now I'm wearing a pair of trial lenses, waiting the prescribed period of one fortnight until the next round, when I enter the Tower of the Sacred Eye and submit to the Test of Toric Rotation. It's all part of my goal to look less like the guy who runs the Dunlop Art Gallery at the downtown public library. His name is Fil and we look absolutely unlike each other, but we hung around together regularly between 1989 and 1991 and now people insist on confusing us. Over the years I've come to recognize within a half-second that the conversation I'm about to have with a friendly stranger will be conducted under the operant premise that I'm Fil. I've gotten really proficient at pretending to be Fil without giving any specific information about his life. He's my most persistent doppelganger, but not my first or only. For a brief period in the early '90s, at bars and gigs in various cities, I had a number of conversations with people who thought I was someone named David. From about '95 to 2000 I was confused regularly with a guy named John, but our bodies have gone their separate physical paths (his in a somewhat lumpy direction, to tell you the truth) and nowadays I occasionally get asked if John and I are brothers. Yes, I tell people: he's my lumpy brother. As with Fil, the similarity between me and John pretty much starts and stops with our glasses.

I'm pretty sure that I've written somewhere on this site about the various celebrities that I've been told I resemble at one time or another. The list is of sufficient breadth that it dissolves into a meaningless array of features that ultimately resemble nobody at all. The only common demoninator is that I am deeply confused and embarrassed that I reminded anybody of these people. And here they are:

Nicholas from Eight is Enough, early '80s, by a group of American tourists; Prince (circa Parade), by a girl I dated in 1986; George Michael (early solo career), 1988, by a group of giggly thirteen year olds at a birthday party held in some deepfry seafood restaurant; Adam Clayton (U2 bassist and worst musician in the band), 1988, by various people; Neil Tennant (Pet Shop Boys singer), 1993, by an obnoxious drunk guy at a bar in Calgary who screamed "Hey! Hey, it's Neil Tennant! Hey everybody, what the fuck is Neil Tennant doing at the Ship & Anchor?" etc.; Gilbert fucking Gottfried, 1993, by a roommate; a hypothetical nephew of Oliver Stone, 1994, same; a hypothetical youthful version of Eric Bogosian, 1997, same; a hypothetical roadie for U2, 1998, same; Elton John (?), 1996, by a woman named Sherry; Andre Agassiz, 1999, by the same woman, years later, on the opening night of Eyes Wide Shut. She stopped me as I was stepping over her feet and said "Hey! You're a dead ringer for Andre Agassiz, you know that?" And you're the woman who thought I looked like Elton John three years ago. And since my latest glasses choice, David Cross, 2002, by a coworker.

This is only a sample of the more memorable ones (how is it that I look like Gilbert Gottfried and Elton John?). I've also been told that I look like some Italian sitcom actor, whose name I have long forgotten, but he looks like someone attacked a younger Robert de Niro and brutally flattened his face. I'm also told that I resemble: some Jewish guy; some Greek guy; some East Indian guy; some Pakistani guy; some Arab guy. Come on people! I'm a continental mongrel cross between an English father of Irish descent and a Bermudian mother with a complicated tangle of West Indies-Azorean Portuguese ancestry! Can't you figure it out?

NUTRITIONAL INFORMATION AT LAST

According to The Viking, you need 16 square feet of water grow one lotus. This, then, settles it: I refuse to cook for The Lotus anymore. From now on, I will put her in the tub at suppertime. Another problem solved. My life keeps on getting simpler and more streamlined every day, sleek as a seal and swift as a bullet. No, really.

Obese males! Beware the dread chameleon Floppy Eyelid Syndrome.

parode - exode