If you ask the internet “What causes dry eye,” you are liable to come up with stuff like “A lack of wetness,” which, as an answer, I—I don’t know about you—find unsatisfying.

It doesn’t explain anything. I want something more detailed, such as cellular degeneration occasioned by viral drone strikes on the mitochondria, which, as we all learned in high school, are the power plants of the cell. Stands to reason if you want to take something down, you hit the power plant. Or the munitions depot, such as, in our case, the bone marrow, where antibodies are produced and stored. This is the kind of thing I want to read about. I won’t be any less screwed, but it satisfies the curiosity in a way that “a lack of wetness” does not.

Even worse, you might discover that a primary cause of dry eye is “age.” Hell with that. I’m familiar with the idea that, basically, the whole personal ship is listing and on the verge of going down as we age. Whoop! Whoop! A lot of ills get put down to “old age” and that’s because nobody’s going to do anything about it, and society is pretty much done with you anyway. Hell with that, too. I had more aches and pains when I was forty than I do now. It wasn’t aging.

However, it is a fact that eyes tend to dry up as we age. There’s a lot of goo involved with running the eyeball operation. Tears are mostly water, produced by glands above the eyes, but there’s an oily component produced by glands in the eyelids, and mucin, which comes out of the eye itself. These components arrange themselves in layers of a film that we blink to renew: the watery part in the middle (“for wetness,” I assume), the oil on the outside so the water doesn’t evaporate as fast, and the mucin—that’s eyeball snot, really—to keep it all sticking to the eye. It’s one fancy film.

(There’s also a lot of fluid inside the eyeball to keep it inflated, an insufficiency of which hardly bears thinking about.)

So tear production slows as we age—especially, it says here, among post-menopausal women. I am quite post- indeed, and getting poster all the time. The oil production can slow down too, and that can have the same effect. So. I bought the Bruder Moist Heat Eye Compress. You microwave it for twenty seconds and rest it over your eyes. And it warms up and unclogs your eyelid oil glands. Better yet, it contains Patented Silver-Infused MediBead Technology!

Oh brother. Sounds like those copper bracelets As Seen On TV that pull goddess juice from the cosmos and realign your polarities, or something. But the Mayo Clinic likes the Bruders, so. Here they are.

After being nuked for twenty seconds, the suckers are actually fairly hot. It’s hard not to think you might be in danger of poaching your eyeballs. I’ve read enough by now to know my eyeballs are made of proteins like everything else and so are eggs. But the MediBead Technologists no doubt did a lot of testing and figured out precisely at which point the eyeball yolks are at the runny stage, and adjusted their directions accordingly. I think the mask is having a positive effect.

And if the whole ship is listing and going down? Well, the cool thing about us old people, we’ve got jetsam. Vanity. Acquisitiveness. Envy. Over the sides they go, and we lighten our load. We’re still going down, but maybe with some grace.

The vanity has to go for sure, if we’re going to be seen wearing our Bruder Eye Compresses.