Magic Eye

I've always been a fan of puzzles and optical illusions. What growing boy hasn't stood in awe, mouth agape, at a card trick or a vanishing act of some sort? Something about the challenge of figuring out the hows and whys behind a tangible or visual conundrum have intrigued the holy crap out of me for as far back as my feeble memory recalls.

It's why I fell head-over-heels for Magic Eye pictures. Remember those bad boys? You know, the sinfully tacky color arrangements that contained a 3-D image somewhere within its pattern. Staring and crossing your eyes at the illustration long enough produced an obscure, shadowy shape -- in retrospect, a rather weak reward for the life wasted staring inanimately at a hideous spread of graphic art.

Was that a Tyrannosaurus Rex eating an ascending Pterodactyl or two koala bears performing an indecent act? No one really knew. But that didn't really matter. What mattered is that you were one of the few who could claim, "Ooh, I see it! I see it!" and then ridicule those who ogled the picture for seven minutes with head shaking and shoulders shrugged in frustration and despair. That's all any of us were really after.

You always kind of felt like an idiot staring at those illustrations, didn't you? I did. But it was like a bowl of M&M's: if it's there, I'm partaking -- you can't just walk by without indulging your senses. Arms folded, posture bent, eyes squinting, head slightly tilted, all in the name of feeding curiosity. And what did we gain in the end? Nothing. Usually disappointment in (a) our failure or (b) its lameness.

The real humor in Magic Eye is that so many people actually had the posters framed and hung in their house or office as if it was serious art. The designs, collages of repeated graphics or intersecting squiggly lines immersed in multicolored computer vomit, were undeniably repulsive -- too ugly to exist on the face of the earth for any other reason than, hey, inside it somewhere is a fighter jet in mid-combat.

And now Magic Eye is nowhere to be seen -- unless you look hard enough. Rather self-prophesying, wasn't it?