Where is Waldo?
I know the strategy. Keep the colors of the crowd varied yet repeating, so the page washes gently together. Place Waldo in a clearing, right out in the relative open. Then, while you’re bogged down in details–your eye sliding down the limbs of a dog pile, peeking under bleachers and between the legs of clustered cheerleaders–Waldo ambles by, fat chin in the air, and vanishes.
He never stops for a story. He is a tourist, not one of these self-reflective participant-observers trying to brush shoulders with The People. What you’ve gotta do is hold the page at arms’ length, blur your eyes, and look for the clearings. It’s a lot easier than Magic Eye, which is impossible.
Using this simple method, I guarantee you can find Waldo in 3 seconds (tops) every time. His world tour will zip by like a breezy, well-edited slide show.
Take, for example, his recent trip to–or, rather, through–landlocked Laos. He skirted foothills and traced rivers, setting wilderness between himself and the urban throngs. I unfocused my eyes and there he was, wetting his ankles in a paddy field, leaving a modest wake. Where indeed.
I called to him. I called loud and clear, punctuating ‘Wal’ and ‘do’; thrusting through their voiceless consonants. Maybe the word sounded native, because he paid no attention. He kept grinning with that terrible face.
I don’t think he has anything worth looking at in that backpack. A man like him has destroyed all appreciation for a ‘good read’. No use for escape and no keepsakes. He thrusts his hand through the flap without lowering his chin and pulls out a neatly bundled change of socks. He has never held a ticket.
One thing I believe he could do is dance. He’d be the perfect student of modern, or jazz–never overthinking-or-trying. He might be a bit wooden, but so certain of limb that you’d wonder if we just couldn’t recognize true grace.
You’d recognize him if you saw him. Then again, you probably saw him and just didn’t know.
What a dick.
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