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Check out my new all-seeing eye. I can see into the future with this damn thing. It's pretty cool unless you're allergic to bad news. If death stresses you a lot, don't get one of these.
I got mine courtesy of Hoopes Vision in Sandy. I went there to have an evil spirit removed from my right eye. They said it was a cataract but I know better.
A nurse named Lila — who was nice but may also have been a witch — put potions in my eye until it looked like this.
Then I was passed along to Shane, who paralyzed me with some kind of mollusk toxin and an extraterrestrial nerve pinch. Anyway, I couldn't move.
Finally, Dr. Phillip Hoopes (the younger one) came in, rummaged about in my eyeball for a moment, then announced that everything looked good. It was all perfectly painless except for the insurance part.
Me: "You got the evil spirit then?"
Doc: "No, it's still in there. I only fixed the part it looks through."
Well, that's something. Doc Hoopes said I would need a whole other doctor — "probably a team of them" — to take care of whatever else was wrong in there.
I'll pass. The last time I had eyes that looked like this was as a cop handling a domestic disturbance. A woman — whose husband had already beaten her bloody — clocked me with an electric skillet because she didn't want him going to jail. Backup took them both.
The difference is that I can see into the future now, or could for as long as the all-seeing eye lasted. Forty-eight hours after surgery, I could still glimpse my occipital lobe in the mirror. And I was still getting flickers of next week.
My first flash of the distant future came while being driven home from Hoopes Vision by The Old Man. I looked over at him and saw myself sitting there in another 21 years — happily jamming down the freeway at 20 mph OVER the speed limit while his/my wife nattered from the back seat to "slow down!"
When I got home, I had a vision of my wife leading me around the house, saying, "Watch this" and "Don't step on the baby" and "That's a dog, not a rug."
I also had a vision that one of my great-great-grandsons will be responsible for the dissolution of the U.S. Congress AND the annexation of Panama as the 53rd U.S. State.
One of my very great-granddaughters will give birth to the child who will one day be known as the first American War Lord, and who will have at least six dictator bank holidays named after him.
Finally, I foretell my next male grandchild — under the guidance of a very ancient Sonny — will be the first person to hit the moon with a dead cow cannon-fired from a backyard on Earth.
Or maybe it's a dead bison. By the time this vision came along, my pupil was already starting to close. It was getting harder to see really important stuff in the future.
I know what you're thinking. "Why doesn't he tell us something useful, like when is Jesus returning to the world, or what stock to buy?"
Because that stuff has already been foretold. According to incarcerated Christian nut job Kent Hovind, Christ will return "during the Feast of Trumpets in 2028."
Buy stock in any medical research involving stem cells and body part regeneration. It's the next big thing, particularly if you can get your hands on some Marilyn Monroe DNA.
Finally, the next huge lottery-winning ticket number will include the numbers "1" and "6."
That's it. That's all I got. Until they do my other eye in a couple of weeks.
Robert Kirby can be reached at rkirby@sltrib.com or facebook.com/stillnotpatbagley. Find his past columns at http://www.sltrib.com/lifestyle/kirby/