I, like I can only assume many others, pencil in at least two hours every Monday to stare at the sun. It helps me strengthen my eyes for when the world eventually runs out of carrots and more importantly makes me feel one with the earth ~namaste~.

When chatting with my friend about this the other week, he mentioned that a lot of people were posting on the internet about something called an eclipse, which I was curious about, so I asked Jeeves. After spending forty minutes looking at Paul Walker’s 1995 model from the first Fast and Furious movie and playing out scenarios in which I would beat it in a street race in the ’17 Subaru Impreza that my dad bought me, I then learned that it was a phenomenon where the moon goes in front of the sun and it makes the light damaging to your eyes.

So I called my eye doctor, and after telling him about my ritual (which he frowned upon) and trying to explain that I didn’t need eye protection because I was ‘built different’, he convinced me that I needed to take action to protect my baby blues. And that brings us to today, where I’ll now go through my options for how I chose to protect my eyes from the solar eclipse.

Ski Goggles

Being the Colorado bro that I am, my first thought was to use my ski goggles. I mean, what’s better than getting to look at the sun while simultaneously imagining that I’m still sending it down the Beavers at A-Bay. But upon further investigation, I realized that my eclipse lenses hadn’t been delivered yet from Evo yet, so I had to pass.

Pit Vipers

The stylish yet unassuming Pit Vipers were my next option, granted I typically only wear them for fancy occasions like going to a new brewery opening or Sunday Mass (where I pray to the Snow Gods, of course). But then my neighbor pointed out to me that they were clashing with my new Cotopaxi windbreaker that I was wearing, and since I was getting so many compliments on it from this past weekend’s wind storm I decided to go a different route.

Cardboard from a Homeless Man

I learned that you could create a pinhole viewer with cardboard, but I ran into an issue where I didn’t have any cardboard left since I used my last piece when hiking Castle Peak the other week (14,278’ NBD). So I improvised, and while my roommate Connor distracted a homeless man at the corner of our street, I was able to snag the sign that he’d been holding up. It turned out to be a total waste of time though, as it yielded the same result as if you held a Cheez-it in the air.

After using the pinhole viewer for a while I decided to just raw dog it with my eyes since I’ve heard that it just feels better. I’ll report back later once these black spots go away.

Nick Ellis is a Denver based standup comedian and writer. Follow him on instagram at @ellisnd so we can be friends.