I’m mad enough to sue the Massachusetts Registry of Motor Vehicles. No agency should be allowed to do what this one has done to me. And without any provocation on my part.

All I did was apply in person for yet another driver’s license. For that, the attendant made me take off my eye glasses. Then she snapped my photo, surely the worst in the annals of the Registry. If not, at least the worst ever taken of me.

By far.

There ought to be a law against such deprivation of facial character. My new license, just now received in the mail, shows me the most bedraggled-looking creature you ever saw.

Do I look like a competent driver? Certainly not ─ but I do look like an incompetent (but dangerous) criminal. Faces like this one can be seen regularly on “America’s Most Wanted.”

But you should have seen the first photo, the one I rejected. It was even worse. But I was given only two tries, leaving me with the second or nothing.

My face is preserved for the next five years, blotched, grim, completely without life.

If I get stopped by a cop and forced to show this license, the officer will never understand why the Registry allows a dead man like me to drive a car.

This is the only condition under which I will show my license. Thus far, no one but me has seen it. I dare not take it out of my pocket for fear members of my household and friends might steal a look at it.

You may know the story of Dorian Gray. In Oscar Wilde’s 1890 novel, Gray’s face is depicted in a painting that shows him growing old and corrupted by his evil deeds, while he himself stays young and handsome. But, at the tragic climax of the novel, Gray is stabbed to death and his body then reveals the face of a hideous old man.

I’m feeling like Dorian Gray. Suddenly I look like 115 instead of a mere 80. They can’t do this to me.

Why would anyone want to so humiliate me? The only motive I can think of is a possible link between the Registry and some unscrupulous plastic surgeons.

Left to my own devices, I would never approach any of the latter for a face lift. I disapprove of such vain efforts to improve nature’s work. But the photo on the new license might break down my resolve and drive me to submit my face to the knife.

Think, this license is the document that I will have to display all over the world. Whenever I am asked by airline officials and security officers to show identification, this will be the face they will see. If they do not reveal the horror they feel, they will at least see mine.

You, however, if you are still with me, may find yourself unsympathetic to my complaints. Perhaps you have faith in technology, and surmise that the camera showed my true face.

You simply think of it as High Definition photography such as you see on your new TV set all the time. This TV allows you to view your favorite personages in excruciating detail.

You brand me as a whiner because I have been confronted with truth and am unable to face up to it. You think me prejudiced against an upstanding state agency that is trying its best to keep me on the road without being picky about my driving abilities.

I admit only that the Registry treated me well the last time I had to renew. On that occasion, all I had to do was sit at my desk while typing in the data and qualifying online. No photo was required then, and they allowed me to go on looking five years younger than I actually was.

Of course, I could then have been absolutely incapable of driving a car and they would never have known the difference. But at least they treated my face with complete indifference instead of violating its natural beauty.

It’s too bad that the photo part ruined my latest visit to the Registry. Otherwise it was such a good experience. Besides having me read an eye-doctor-like chart of letters, they did nothing else to bother me.

I never had to demonstrate any competence whatever at the wheel. Surely this is an inventive ideal of traffic safety: the Registry satisfies itself that, if drivers like me have survived Boston area traffic this long, they must know something about how to drive.

“Were thine that special face” sings the lover in Cole Porter’s Kiss Me Kate. I don’t have to claim mine as all that special, but still I will long for the one I had before the new card forced on me a remake.

Richard Griffin