As I’ve grown older, it’s become clear that I need glasses.

I’ve always avoided getting glasses for a couple reasons. First of all, I’m NOT some nerd. Secondly, one time I tried on someone else’s glasses and it didn’t help my vision at all. In fact, it actually made it WORSE! So I was pretty confident “glasses” just weren’t something that would work for me.

I used to pride myself on having really strong eyes. As a child, I could stare at the sun for hours on end with really no effect. I would take money from the neighborhood kids to drip Tabasco sauce and detergent and other stuff into my eyes. That’s how strong they were! So you can imagine my shock when I noticed that my eyes were failing me as I got older.

The moment I accepted my fading vision came during a road trip with my girlfriend. While driving, I developed a quick vision test. I spotted a big evergreen tree in the distance with a sign on it. I told my girlfriend to tell me when she could clearly read the sign on the tree. If she could see it way before I could, I would get glasses. My girlfriend agreed and then pointed out that the tree I was referencing was in fact my own air-freshener hanging from the rearview mirror – and also that I had driven the car into a ravine five minutes earlier.

Clearly, I had failed my own test. I started to realize that the good-smelling blurry thing I called a girlfriend and all the other amorphous unfocused shapes in my life were probably right: I needed glasses. It was time to face the facts and go to the eye doctor to begin my transition from a lovable Season 1 Chandler into a detestable Season 7 Chandler.

I bought my glasses at a hip new store in San Francisco, which is redundant cause every store in San Francisco is hip and new. After testing out a number of frames, I found a pair I really liked.

Note: If you are a guy and you find a pair of glasses you really like, it’s important to remember that you are definitely wrong. You will want to have a girlfriend or wife on hand to point this out to you and have them select a pair that doesn’t make you look like Squints from The Sandlot.

As a newly window-faced man, I tried to find some Silver Linings, which is a brand of bed linings for seniors with bladder control issues. After I found those, I looked for some positive aspects of having glasses. I realized glasses would help me look smarter. I could probably talk more about dinosaurs and say the word binary without so many people saying that I’m “uninformed” or “not using words correctly.”

Also if I ever found myself in some weird Lost situation where I was stranded on an island with attractive people, I could start a fire using only my glasses and the sun. This type of resourcefulness would probably help me hook up with the third hottest girl on the island.

Note: I figure there’s a smart doctor-type on the island who’s going to get the #1 hot girl. And then there’s always like a scruffy loser guy who’s super hot and also rebellious and kind of dangerous – he’ll get #2, obviously. Sometimes the rebellious guy will also hook up with #1 behind the doctor guy’s back. This will cause tension but will also give me and #3 stuff to gossip about before dying from dehydration and/or smoke monsters. Of course, this is all assuming that there isn’t a witty guy with a cool accent also on the island. If there is, I’d be down to #4, and everyone knows that by the time you’re down to the fourth hottest girl stranded on the island, you might as well be hooking up with the volleyball you painted a face on.

Anyway, the point is glasses could be helpful in future sexy survivalist situations, which is great.

Also if I ever get to time travel, glasses will make it easier to differentiate past-me from future-me. So let’s say I’m sent back in time to stop myself from starting the apocalypse. And at some point, you – the super attractive reader of this article – find yourself pointing a gun at two different versions of me, unsure of which one to shoot.

Then you remember, “Future-Ryan wears glasses!”

So you point the gun at the Ryan without the glasses like you are going to shoot him, but at the last second you turn and shoot the Ryan with the glasses, because you know that evil Past-Ryan would definitely have stolen the glasses to try to trick you into thinking he was Future-Ryan!

Nice try Past-Ryan, you sneaky piece of shit!

Then Future-Ryan thanks you for saving the world and maybe we make out for a second or something (if you are into it, no pressure) before I slowly fade away because technically you killed me a long, long time ago.

Pretty crazy, huh? Well that’s what happens when you fuck with time travel.

Anyway, I guess what I’m saying is that the glasses are alright.

Ryan Patricks is a comedy writer based in San Francisco, CA. His work has appeared on multiple comedy sites and his mom’s refrigerator. He tweets at @ryan_patricks. His new book, You’re Not Helping…is now available.