I’m not really disabled but the “D” follows me around. He’s a shadow. He’s a shadow who’s roughly 7 years old and he wants to show me the picture he’s just drawn. He is in short, annoying.
“C’mon, look!” he says. “Look!”
I look. Its a Jackson Pollock on the back of an envelope.
“That’s your blindness,” he says, proudly.
I try explaining that blindness isn’t so complicated. I tell him its like having brown hair. Its only a component part of a life.
“No,” he says, “Blindness is what everyone sees and so you live inside it, just as Pollock lived inside his paintings.”
The D has a point. Even on my best days I can’t control the pesky public.
“Besides,” he says, “blindness becomes you.”
“You mean that ironically?” I ask.
“Oh,” he says, “of course I do.”
“So I could conceivably “un-become” blindness?”
“No, that would be an illusion,” he says.
Then he adds: “If the public thinks your blindness is the whole shebang, its the shebang.”
And because he’s roughly 7 years old he says: “Nyah nyah!”
“If you go water skiing, you’re a BLIND water skiier!”
“If you take a walk, you’re a BLIND guy taking a walk.”
“Get over it!”
“Here, look at what I drew!”
“Now you’re really being ironic,” I say.
“I’ll describe it for you. Its a man being chased by bees.”
“How Dantesque of you,” I say.
“Oh,” he says, “I’ll have to read him.”
Planet of the Blind 