I’m not sure how many nights in a row I tried to blink the crud out of my eyes before it occurred to me that maybe I’d gotten a little scratch, and would have to just wait it out; but it took even more such nights before I thought: Wait. This might be a sign of Dry Eye.

Dry Eye is a disgusting thought. One of the salutary features of eyeballs is their juiciness, inside and out. You don’t want your eyeballs flaking off like bulbs of garlic. Actually, the more you think about your eyeballs, the scarier they get. They’re so damp and squishy. So vulnerable.

I still remember how appalled I was at the story of Samson in the Bible. The Bible is widely considered recommended reading but there are no trigger warnings in the thing and it’s full of sex and violence and gore. Samson was my favorite character—I always did like those strong, long-haired boys. And I was a little kid, so I sailed right past him “going in unto” a harlot, and skipped merrily past Delilah tying him up with ropes, and didn’t even notice the part where Samson suggested she bind him up with ropes, twice, but I completely seized up when the Philistines “put out his eyes.” Gad.

I visualized it being done with a spoon. Scoop! My horror knew no bounds. It probably didn’t involve a spoon.

But the thing is, eyes can be destroyed in a blink, as it were.

They’re no doubt tougher than they appear. They’d have to be. I spent decades floating little hard plastic discs on them, the unforgiving kind, and sometimes the discs slid off-center and traveled around the white part, and sometimes they got stuck there so hard that they left a sore, circular impression once they were finally coaxed out. I learned to touch my own eyeballs with a finger moistened with spit, to get an eyelash off before it sliced under the contact lens, and probably that is not a recommended protocol in optometry. I don’t know.

So that’s what I was doing, trying to wipe off nonexistent crud from my eyes with my finger, before the whole Dry Eye thing occurred to me. I asked the friend I was texting with at the time if she knew what to do about Dry Eye, a drop or an ointment or something, because that is a lot easier than asking the doctor, and she said Yes. Get the Bruder Eye Mask. The what-now?

I looked it up. It was a Moist Heat Eye Compress and, more importantly, as the images reveal, it has a very high dork factor. Throw that puppy on and add a CPAP apparatus and a propeller-beanie and nobody will ever take you seriously again. Nobody takes me all that seriously now. I wasn’t put off. And the Mayo Clinic liked it.

I ordered it. But then I wanted to know how it worked, and, in fact, how eyes work, and how they stay swampy. Google eyes, I thought then. So I did.

To be continued.