Like many across the country, Madison Walsh was disappointed to discover last week that eclipse viewing glasses had become scarce. After a futile search for a remaining pair of safety specs, she finally decided to simply take a quick glance of the eclipse with her naked eyes. That decision proved to be life-changing as now, every single man that she lays eyes on for the rest of her life will appear as host of the Nickelodeon show Legends of the Hidden Temple Kirk Fogg.
“See this darkened spot on my eye here?” Madison says. “I don’t have a blind spot, but now any man who appears in my sightline is Kirk Fogg, the charismatic host of a Nickelodeon children’s game show that aired from 1993 to 1995. Weird, right?”
It became clear that something was amiss when, immediately after glancing at the eclipse, Madison turned to her boyfriend to find him swinging from a vine, holding a microphone and wearing a pair of khakis. When she asked her boyfriend to stop swinging and just chill for one second, he knew something was wrong and rushed her to the hospital.
“I’ve never seen anything like this,” says Amara Siegel, the admitting ER doctor. “There were so many warnings – it’s a shame Madison didn’t listen or this could have been prevented. The damage itself is so odd, though. I don’t quite have the medical terminology to describe it but it just seems… random and dumb? Yeah.”
To Madison, every man – no matter size, height, race, or age – will now appear as a very real Kirk Fogg, due to a very specific form of retinal damage that cannot be explained by modern science. Doctors have guessed that perhaps Walsh was thinking about Kirk Fogg as she viewed the eclipse and that as her retina was burning, her brain sealed up the damage with a pristine image of Fogg’s form.
“I mean yeah I think about Kirk Fogg a lot,” says Walsh. “Like, a lot. So?”
Walsh resisted treatment at first, but only because many of the doctors looked like Kirk Fogg, and before they could even check her heartbeat, Madison started running up and down the ER hallways and breathlessly screaming answers to questions about The Plumed Headdress of Cosarara.
“Ok so here’s the weird thing,” confesses Walsh, “I know now that what I’m seeing is not actually Kirk Fogg, but I’m still willing to do whatever it takes to win a Zenith portable boombox and Bauer inline skates.”
