Diary,
There’s a verse in the Bible that goes something like, “If your right eye causes you to stumble, gouge it out and throw it away. It is better for you to lose one part of your body than for your whole body to be thrown into hell.”
Given this analogy, I’d change the second part to, “It is better for you to lose one part of your body than for your marriage to turn into hell.” To remain married, most men would have to gouge out their eyes. Men’s eyes are like magnets that are only attracted to trouble. Enoch raised this point the other evening as we sat for drinks.
“She just slapped me,” he said of his wife Amina. “I mean, one minute we were talking about…” he drifts off.
“You know something? I don’t even remember what we were talking about. Probably something to do with fashion or a friend of hers who’s getting fat. All I can tell you is, a woman in yoga pants was coming from the opposite direction. As she passed us, I took a peek.”
“A peek?” I laughed. “No man has ever taken a peek, Enoch. We rubberneck and linger for as long as we can get away with it. Do you have any idea how many people I’ve bumped into because my head was facing backward, salivating over some legs?”
“Fun fact,” Lucas, a mechanic, chimed in. “Most bumper dings are caused by the lust of men. It’s true. Either they’d be on their phones looking at pictures or distracted by a passing figure eight.”
“It’s like work, having to remember not to look,” Enoch complained. “I thought the thing I’d miss the most after getting married was sleeping diagonally on the bed. Now I miss just looking.”
“What’s up, Azizi?” I asked our other pal, who’d been too quiet. Then I saw where his eyes were focused. Laughing, I pointed to him and said, “Case in point.”
“What?” Azizi said as if coming out of a dream. “Guys, is it just me or is Crystal getting prettier every passing day?”
Now we all laughed.
“It’s called ‘Beer goggles’, stupid,” Lucas said. “Any woman who starts as a four becomes a nine after five beers or so. Two beers for you, since you can’t hold your liquor if a kitten’s life depended on it.”
“I think the whole ‘rating women’ thing is wrong, anyway,” Azizi said, seriously. “There’s more to a woman than mere looks, you know?”
“Yeah?” I taunted. “What do you know about Crystal apart from the fact that she can balance 10 glasses on a tray and never miss a step?”
“That’s a start, isn’t it? Maybe her life is equally as balanced.”
“Guys!” Enoch bangs the table. “Azizi is free to exercise his God-given right to ogle any woman he desires. I’m the one with a problem, remember?”
Lucas says, “We hear you, Enoch, but what do you want from us?”
“A solution. You know. Like the way you cure hiccups by getting someone to scare you. There’s got to be a remedy for wandering eyes.”
“First of all, as a doctor, I can tell you that is absolute crap,” I said, laughing.
“And secondly?”
I stared at him blankly. “I don’t know, that’s all I have.”
“Maybe you could pinch yourself,” Azizi offered. “I do it to stay awake in church.”
“Either that, or you wear one of those cones they put on dogs to prevent them from licking their wounds,” Lucas says.
This time, even Enoch bursts into laughter.
