Inbred shiatsus have less tear output, and at least they have the fur to soak it up once it’s made a run for the border. The world’s favorite hawker of panini-makers needs to turn those greasy peepers away from camera four and over to an ophthalmologist who can dry that shit up. I don’t like it. It’s disgusting.

And I know that goo isn’t tears because it is present even when she’s not talking about her shameful kinship with potato chips. If I wanted to watch an hour of juicing, I’d flip back to the Jack Lalane informercial I was watching before I started craving liquefied celery.

But I don’t want to watch an hour of viscous fluid production; that’s why I changed the goddamn channel in the first place! So for the love of G.O.B., will you get those things fixed?!

Half convinced the Sadistic Eyelash Curler from Hell was real or one day could be, you decide to celebrate the gift that is your ability to see. In honor of your incredible luck at not having gone blind yet, you opt to enjoy the one thing that makes life almost worth living: the 1984 classic film, The Brother from Another Planet.

Oh, you’re not aware of this stunning cinematic achievement? Well, then. I guess you’re not like me after all. Allow me to introduce you to the best synopsis of all time. What follows is almost exactly what was written in the Netflix text blurb, give or take some words on account of my Xanax intake at the time I read and attempted to memorize it.

An adult humanoid slave from outer space lands on Earth and must evade bounty hunters while attempting to win over his would-be adopters with his technical wizardry. The Brother From Another Planet is a heartfelt look at race and belonging.

Now, you may be saying to yourself, “Sybil, why is it so important that I maintain my eye health so that I might enjoy this ’80s blockbuster?”

And to you I might say, “Why ask such obvious rhetorical questions when so many more important queries exist. Queries such as, How can I reach the Brother’s level of technical wizardry so that I, too, may one day fix a broken arcade game with the touch of my hand? What set of skills must I acquire so that I, also, could regenerate my three-toed foot after crash landing on another planet and sustaining serious injury to my walking pod region? These are the important inquiries one must focus on at the present moment.”

“I see,” you say.

“And a good thing that is, sir/madam. Because if you could not see, you would have no idea what the fuck was going on in The Brother from Another Planet. And that is because the Brother is mute. He is a bona fide anti-talker. This dude is communicating on a level Scooby Doo can’t decipher. Elephants cannot hear this man. His screams of pain and longing are in freaking capable of being perceived by the human ear.

That’s right; you better thank your lucky Russian spy satellites that you can see, because if you were blind, you’d be looking at one hour, forty-nine minutes, and twenty-seven seconds of confusion. Well, literally, you wouldn’t be looking at anything, of course, but the real bummer is you couldn’t even get a mind picture of what the hell was happening on screen. Your ability to hear any kind of plot in this film is rendered moot since the protag makes less sound than my grandma’s debarked collie.”

So, I think we’ve all learned something here today. Appreciate your most important sense (the one you ALWAYS choose to keep in a game of Would You Rather) and by God, do not waste another minute using it to gaze at anything besides the most entertaining display of technical wizardry to hit the screen since Short Circuit 2 robot rolled into town.

Cut to a bar where it’s clear at least a baker’s dozen of the patrons are teetering on the verge of falling into a Venn diagram that’s labeled “Angry Drunk” on the left and “Sad Drunk” on the right with a few “Batshit Crazy Hybrids” smashed into the middle. Someone’s about to start weeping while slurring “I love you, man,” and someone’s about to get punched in the face; probably the creepy dude who has his friend in a headlock and is slurring sweet nothings into his ear. You know the vibe, the escalating tension and your semi-sober observation that more than a couple human booze recepticles in the perimeter could use an IV drip before they slip into either an alcohol poisoning or fist-induced coma.

Things are nearing Red Alert Wiggity Wack Status – at least that’s how they feel to me in my constant state of human presence-induced anxiety. I think, I can either back away slowly and head up to my hotel room or I can stand there a minute longer and risk ending up in the middle of a bar brawl whilst blowing my rape whistle and pushing two people apart human wall style.

Knowing the latter could lead to me taking a few knocks to the eye region, I select Option A and begin backing up toward the doorway. I silently exit the way you do when a hungry mountain lion has just prowled onto the set of your Jimmy Dean photo shoot only to find you posing in a sausage suit. Because we’ve all been there, haven’t we?

As I ride the elevator up to my room, I become aware that my stomach does not approve of my pouring a keg’s worth of Sam Adams into it. This suspicion becomes clearer to me when I fall through my hotel room door and discover I have about negative three seconds to make it to the toilet before puking all over the kind of carpet that makes you both dizzy and inspired to go back downstairs in search of craps tables.

Feeling all Linda Blaire in The Exorcist, I stumble into the bathroom, and that’s when the toilet seat from hell attacks. I slam it up to puke and it slams right back down and clocks me in the face. It smashes my cranium into the bowl and nearly gouges out my eyeball.

Why in the hell would any company produce sharp, pointy-ended, horseshoe-shaped toilet seats? That’s just fantastic! Hi, everyone. I’m now a Cyclopes and let me explain to every person staring at my eye patch why exactly that is. This is a story I want to repeat to small children for the rest of my life.

So I’m sobbing and bleeding from the face — convinced it’s not cheek, but actual eye blood spurting from my head in a manner would make Tarantino proud — and all the while still puking, when my husband follows my Tru Blood ESP distress calls up to our hotel room. He swoops in the door, takes one look at me, then disappears.

This angers me, as I’ve just gone to the trouble of popping a Tic-Tac into my piehole. He comes back a minute later with a bag of ice, as I’m ridding myself of the one calorie breath mint. He starts acting all tender, smashing the homemade glacier against my swollen head and saying romantic things like, “I’m sure you’ll get to keep both of your eyes.”

The next day, after finding myself still vomiting, while standing in line at curbside check-in, I discover that going blind would’ve been a blessing, because then I wouldn’t’ve had to see the CEO of my former employer sitting directly across the aisle from me on my flight home. Makeupless, exhausted, and looking like I just ran into Kimbo Slice and told him he was a pussy who couldn’t throw a punch to save his life, I am in no state to be anywhere near the person whose very presence outside my old cubicle used to send me into asthmatic panic attacks.

Despite my insane fear of heights, I spend most of that flight home staring out the window — not only biding my time envisioning my escape route, but breaking my neck to hide both my identity and my toilet seat injury. By the time we land, every body part above my shoulders throbs with pain, but my story has a happy ending. Brian was right; I did get to keep both my eyes and neither of them have had any painful contact with a toilet seat or my intimidating former employer since.

I paused, mid-swallow, and thought to myself, “No, surely root beer cannot attack as well. Was shattering my illusions that I might safely one day snuggle with the cutest Zoro-masked furballs in the rodent kingdom not enough for you, God?! Must you now taint my favorite non-Mr. Pibb soft drink with images of death, too?”

I considered the caps lock warning, hoping the only reason my root beer bore a disclaimer was because some overzealous fetus-loving organization had won a lawsuit against pregnant caffeine addicts, but then I remembered…A&W isn’t caffeinated. 

At this point I decided I might as well see what new phobia I could add to my list of Things That Make Me a Pussy and was confronted with the single most horrifying tidbit of information I could have read: 

CAP MAY BLOW OFF CAUSING EYE OR SERIOUS OTHER INJURY. POINT AWAY FROM FACE AND PEOPLE, ESPECIALLY WHILE OPENING.

Fine, I thought, I’ll point it away from my face while opening next time, unless I’m wearing my onion goggles, but how in the hell am I supposed to point it away from my face while I’m chugging out of it?

This was only the first of many disheartening contemplations the admonition evoked. Not only was I disturbed that even root beer could force me to relive my formative days as the only girl on my preschool campus sporting an eye patch, but I was troubled by the fact that, apparently, my mother has a secret second job in copywriting for A&W.

Now every time I see someone selecting a soda in a vending machine, I’m going to feel the need to scream, “Stop! You could put my eye out with that thing.” And I was just celebrating the fact that no one had hit me in the eye with a champagne cork over the holidays. I’m so glad my embarrassing urge to duck and cover my face every time someone mentions they’re thirsty is going to last year-round.

Thanks a lot, Authority of Dr Pepper/Seven Up, Inc. Don’t be surprised if you get an irate call on your 866 number when my Damnbien kicks in in another six to nine minutes. We’ll see who needs a warning then. Oh, we’ll see indeed.