A million Americans will get laser eye surgery this year and I will not be one of them. Once a signature for rock stars – from Buddy Holly to John Lennon to Elton John – glasses have been in hasty retreat since at least 2001, when John, owner of 20,000 pair of spectacles that really were spectacles, announced he was getting Lasiked.

People who are newly Lasiked, like people who are newly married, are always trying to sell their friends on it. But I like glasses. All my friends who’ve had laser surgery say the same thing: “Now I can see in the shower.” I tell them: Visual acuity is the last thing I want in the shower. Same goes for the bathroom mirror, where I prefer to greet myself – and the day – in a gauzy, soft-focus, Barbara Walters-interviews-Barbra Streisand myopia.

Nero is said to have worn the first corrective lens, viewing gladiatorial exhibitions through an emerald. The emerald also served as half a pair of sunglasses, those icons of ennui: Perfect for the man who fiddled while Rome burned. And there remains, among political leaders, a stigma to astigmatism. The presidential candidates, always rattling on about “vision,” never wear glasses. Wearing them was a capital offense under Pol Pot.

My vision is bad enough that I would not have survived adolescence had I been born into that benighted world before corrective lenses really kicked in, sometime after the Middle Ages. Even now I often find myself in that Gordian knot: Unable to find my glasses because I am not wearing my glasses.

I got my first pair in eighth grade and spent the ride home seeing the world as if for the first time, reading street signs and billboards with my head out the window like a dog’s. In the years that followed, my love of glasses only grew. And so, alas, did my glasses: From Larry King to Harry Caray to Hubble Telescope-size, culminating in a pair of backboards-at-Boston-Garden numbers that made my head bow like a sunflower’s.

It was during this eyewear era that I was interviewed by Michael McCambridge for his book The Franchise, in which he described me physically — with more accuracy than I care to admit — as resembling the comic-strip character Funky Winkerbean.

In my nightstand are an emergency pair that make me look like Dorothy Hamill. (If I have to confront a burglar in the night, he will tremble at the approach of Tootsie.) I have an old pair that appear to be the love child of John Denver’s and John Lennon’s glasses. (If glasses could procreate, surely they would print up bumper stickers that read “Glasses Do It In About An Hour.”)

I’ve had glasses that made me look like Dame Edna and glasses that made me look like The Nutty Professor, and yet I don’t regret any of them, and why would I? They were, for years at a time, part of my face. Hindsight is 20/20. But life is lived at 20/400.

People sometimes ask how I write, and the truth is it’s all a stream of consciousness – or more often, a trickle of consciousness, a dried-up creekbed of consciousness. But here’s what I mean:

BSyken sends this link to something called a beard cap. The beard cap makes anyone who wears it look like Yukon Cornelius from “Rudolph The Red-Nosed Reindeer.” Yukon Cornelius makes me think of Don Cornelius, the famously deep-voiced host of “Soul Train.” And that, in turn, brings me to the topic of this post: The best low voices of all time – the most profound of the basso profundi. (G.A., please correct me if I’ve mis-pluralized basso profundo):

—-Barry White: A Harvard study links male “reproductive success” with deep voices, a thesis borne out by Barry, who is certainly associated with reproductive success.

—-Bowser: Sha Na Na’s biceps-baring baritone. If the music industry ever studies its own steroid issues, he will not be named in its Mitchell Report.

—-”Oh Yeah”: Or more specifically, The Guy Who Says “Oh Yeah” In The Song “Oh Yeah” By Yello, From The Michael J. Fox Flick “The Secret Of My Success”. You know who I’m talking about.

—-Oak Ridge Boy Number Four: Which is to say, The Guy From The Oak Ridge Boys Who Sings The Low Parts in “Elvira” (“Giddy-up a hoom-bapa hoom-bapa mow-mow.”)

—-James Earl Jones: In either his “THIS . .  . is C-N-N” role or his “Luke I am your father” role.

—-Paul Robeson: Especially when singing “Ol’ Man River.”

—-Tone-Loc: I interviewed him in Las Vegas a few years ago and spent the next two months involuntarily singing, “I need $50 to make you holler I get paid to do the Wild Thing.”

My buddy Mike is visiting from Minnesota. We grew up together in Bloomington. In high school, he bought a girl’s fake-gold necklace with a “Sweet 16” pendant and snapped off the number, so that it just said “Sweet”.

We hung out at Whitey’s: White Castle. In high school, not today. Whitey’s was next to Beanie’s, the video-game arcade. If you had quarters and brain cells in inverse relation to one another, you could play Gorf all day at Beanie’s, then repair to Whitey’s, where seven quarters got you ten Disgustings.

At Whitey’s, we ordered “Ten Disgustings and a box of nails.” Counter personnel at Whitey’s knew that Disgustings were shorthand – longhand, when you count up the letters – for hamburgers. They seldom questioned the order. A box of nails, of course, was and remains an order of French fries. You got 10 Disgustings and a box of nails for two bucks. This was 1984, not 1894. If you wanted cheese, you asked for sliders with vinyl.

The TV Week supplement to the Sunday Minneapolis Tribune always had a coupon for 10 Disgustings for $1.75 and you’d plunk that down on the stainless steel counter as if it were a fiver and you were demanding a shot. Occasionally you’d have the coupon wrong-side-up, revealing the plot synopsis of “BJ & The Bear.” (“When BJ takes ill, the Bear takes the wheel.”) It didn’t matter. They’d still give you the Disgustings.

Whitey’s was Arnold’s, from “Happy Days,” 30 years later. And indeed the rent-a-cop who walked the tiled beat there was named Arnie. Arnie wore a badge of the same metallurgical composition as Mike’s pendant. Arnie recited his own poetry. Looking back, that is a poignant detail – picture Carl Sandburg in Carl’s Jr. – but we couldn’t comprehend that at the time.

We were young and dumb and supremely confident, and wore pendants that said “Sweet.” We should have worn sandwich boards that said “Buffoon.” Our pockets and heads and stomachs were full (with quarters and dreams and Disgustings). We thought we were cool – we thought we were Sweet – but what did we know?

We’re sitting in my kitchen now, Mike and me, listening to The Hold Steady sing, “I guess the heavy stuff ain’t quite at its heaviest/By the time it gets out to suburban Minneapolis.”

On the radio tonight a reporter spoke of the “VIN numbers” of stolen cars, even though “VIN” incorporates the word “number,” as in “Vehicle Identification Number.” It brought to mind the day Magic Johnson declared – movingly but redundantly – that he had contracted the “HIV virus.” (Magic said he had “attained” it, you’ll recall, rather than “obtained” it, but then how many NBA titles did William Safire win?)

On Sunday’s Super Bowl pregame show, Fox ran a scripted feature on “resiliency,” a non-word that was repeated at least a dozen times and was spelled out in a graphic for good measure. Tragically, “resiliency” only appears in dictionaries because knuckleheads have mis-used it into usage — have used it into mis-usage — as a four-syllable alternative to the three-syllable “resilience.”

“Resiliency” is nothing if not resilient, and often issues from the mouths of sports announcers, who are also trying to hammer “athleticism” into the dictionary. “Athleticism” is the bane of my father’s existence, what he rails against from his faux-leather lounger. Whenever I hear it, I think of an exorcism performed on an athlete: The athleticism was successful.

From the possessed to the possessive: I spent Saturday afternoon walking around Boston and quietly chafing at the apostate apostrophes – in “Ticket’s” and “VIP’s” and the like – on various signs in the Athens of America.

Why do people find the apostrophe so vexing, especially when it’s used as the stand-in for a missing letter? Why is the shortened version of “and” – ‘n’ – so troublesome? It’s not this ‘n that or this n’ that. It’s this ‘n’ that, dammit. If you’re abbreviating 2007, it’s ‘07 – not 07′, as I have seen spray-painted on so many bridges by so many members of the Classes of 2007.

The apostrophe should not be used by everyone, and ought to come with a warning label, signed by all future surgeons general. (For the love of God, yes: Like holes-in-one, brothers-in-law and attorneys general, that is the proper pluralization.)

I’m a grouchy old bastard and I pity the next bank or credit card company representative who asks me for my “PIN number.” He or she — he ‘n’ she? — are in for one hell of an eye-glazing lecture.