Eveyone Who Thinks Jail In Texas Probably Sucks Say "Eye!"

What follows is a quite from Yahoo News, “HOUSTON – A Texas death row inmate with a history of mental problems pulled out his only good eye and told authorities he ate it. “

Now we all know prison food is bad. Sometimes it’s so bad you don’t even want to look at it, but this is an extreme reaction to say the least. The thing that truly struck me about this sentence though, even more than the act of self de-eyeification, is the phrase, “Pulled out his only good eye.”

One of two words needs to leave this phrase. If you say, “Pulled out his good eye,” I would assume that it is his only good eye. If you go to the trouble to add modifiers like “good” to an eye description I’m assuming it’s because there is an eye that is bad or, at least, less good. Further, I know we’re living in a multi cultural society with people from all over the Earth, but I’ve ridden It’s A Small World dozens of times and all of those kids are two-eyed. I may be naïve here, but when reading without the aid of pictures, I assume the subject is not or was not tri-clopsian.

If you wish to read the whole article you can check it out here, but I highly recommend you skip it. It’s an awful tail. The one point made that is relevant, however, is how his delicious eye became his good eye. He had previously plucked out the other. This guy is a habitual eye-plucker and we can all be thankful that he took his own two first making him less of an eye-plucking danger to the world at large (and by at large I mean roaming death row in Texas [and maybe it’s just me, but isn’t all of Texas essentially death row without the conjugal visits?]).

Hearkening back to my word selection diatribe of four sentences ago, if the guy had only one eye, do we need to say it’s his lone good eye? It’s his lone eye, period, further qualifications are superfluous at best. I could make the case for calling it his one bad eye if it was a particularly bad eye. Maybe he had one eye that didn’t work or smelled weird, then it would be a lone bad eye. Otherwise, one eye is eye description enough.

So I’m through my linguistic freak out. Now I’m left with the empty feeling you get when you run into a true head scratcher. This guy consumed fifty percent of his own eyes in Texas prison without making news. What the hell is going on in Texas death row that you need to eat both of your own eyes in separate sittings to get a little air play? Is it like Thunder Dome with twangy guitar?

“Um, yes, I was bored, so I removed and ate half of my eyes.”

“Yeah? Well the guy in the cell next to you sawed through the bars using a contraband copy of Tiger Beat magazine and escaped using a parachute made out of his own scrotum. Better luck next time, Captain Boring!”

This is the reason I confine my felonies to states above the Mason Dixon line. This weekend, for instance, I am traveling to Pennsylvania to commit regicide.

Jimmy