I grow more anxious as days pass with not even a Facebook post about it. I research Multiple Personality Disorder, and when none of the symptoms applies to me, I’m actually kind of bummed out, that’s how stressed out I am about this business with the moons. To double check, in my bedroom, I stand still, and then suddenly twirl around dramatically to face the mirror, figuring I can maybe catch one of my multiple personalities off guard…but it just makes me dizzy. Almost fearfully, I check the night sky. The two moons are as close together as they were before, one might even be overlapping the other a bit. I remember that some diseases cause you to get raving mad? Like, could I have …syphilis? Or — rabies? But don’t I need a bat bite or something to get rabies?
Then I consider the alternative to mental illness (aside from the chance there really are two moons): hallucinations. It’s possible, I realize, that I am not insane; instead, for some reason, I’m hallucinating two moons. This would be an extremely specific type of hallucination, a lunar hallucination, actually, a double-lunar hallucination, and I’m damned if I can think of a reason I might develop double vision for just one particular planet, and nothing else….I check it out, and confirm I don’t see two of anything else (unless there are two of something else, obviously; for instance, I see two twins, not four, that’s what I am trying to say. If I knew twins, I mean, I’d see two, not four, but I don’t know any twins, but I check it out thoroughly, and only the moon has doubled, nothing else).
So finally, I go to the eye doctor, where I haven’t been since I was about eight years old. The same doctor sets my chin on the same machine and shows me the same black letters lined up on the screen, asking me to compare: is this one better or worse, better or worse, better or worse? I’m like, proud, you know, when I pass that test, like, with flying colors, I’m pretty sure (but you’d think in these last 30 years they would have invented something a little more high-tech than the better-or-worse test, right?).
Then, I confide in him the mystery of the two moons. He listens carefully, and he nods a couple of times almost as though he’s heard this before. Then, to my overwhelming relief, he clears it all up. I am not crazy. I am not hallucinating, not really. I probably don’t have Multiple Personality Disorder (although remember, of course, the doc is an optometrist, not a psychiatrist, they’re pretty different specialties, obviously).
Anyway. The best news is that there is still just the one moon. What I have is a cataract, a cataract in one eye, and something about it and my lens and the night light and the reflection or the refraction or the reaction or something — causes my eyes to see two moons. I even have a smaller cataract in my other eye! This is great news! I want to kiss this doctor (but I don’t). I am not crazy! I am actually happy to learn that I share a medical condition with people so old, they are even older than my own grandparents would be if they were alive; the oldest division, or chapter, or whatever, of our population. I don’t mind, so what if the surgeon’s waiting room will be filled with double-planet-seeing blue-hairs reading AARP Magazine! (Which is pretty much exactly what I see a week later when I visit the surgeon for the first time.)
Even the news that to cure this will require the introduction of a laser beam into my eyeball, which seems kind of, you know, counter intuitive, can’t diminish the relief I feel at learning I am sick, not crazy. ‘I have a delicate medical condition’, I tell myself. Even the expense of the proposed surgery doesn’t dim my euphoria – my world hasn’t changed, and I can reside there a little longer; my world, where I belong, where I don’t hallucinate, where there is just one moon in the sky, and where the people around me are (allegedly) sane (even if some could have Multiple Personality Disorder. You wouldn’t necessarily know if you met a person with it, would you? Not until you’d met them again and again, and each time, a different personality greeted you, then you’d guess something was up…).
Then I start to worry about my other eye, which also harbors a cataract. What tricks will it play on me? How will I know? Will it give me a fake double vision? Or will it be much craftier than that? Like– I start seeing piles of money lying around, and jumping on them? Will it make objects triple…or maybe disappear? Or will it make me see, I don’t know, like a herd, or whatever — a flock, I guess — of ostriches crossing the street? Or, like…wings on cars? Or maybe…red-hot lava and quicksand churning along the street where I live….
I’ll report on that insanity when it begins. For now, you can rest easy knowing the Drummer’s happy temperament has been restored by the diagnosis of an expensive, dangerous eye disease. That’s irony, right? Or is it paradox? Anyway, it’s pretty crazy, right?
A DIFFERENT DRUMMER 
I love how you put all this so eloquently. You have a great way of telling a story!
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