What if, in addition to the very obvious physical puberty we all experience as adolescents, we also are capable of undergoing a later, subtler, second puberty, one which has no physical manifestations but which affects the mind as profoundly as the first puberty affects the body? What if, what if... One result of the first puberty, at least among males, is an increased responsiveness to, and desire for, pictures of human genitalia. Judging from cave paintings, this has been the case since the beginning of history. From those crude beginnings, the lubricious interest of young males has continued (Pompeii, Renassiance engravings, pornographic tintypes, etc.), reaching its fullest flower in the thousands of Internet skin sites. All this graphic activity of such ancient lineage has only one purpose: to help the male scratch the itch known as horniness. Grant for a moment that a second, less physical, more psychic puberty exists. (We don't need to go into the evidence for such here, but just think of the screeds--some extremely beneficial, others just plain wild--that have come to us from older persons who've one way or another escaped the rat race and gone back to nature. If this second puberty does exist, it seems to be quite fragile and somehow related to the contemplation of nature, so much so that for most of us, who remain immersed in the demands of daily, civilized life, it never manifest.) If Puberty No. 2 exists, and if it requires solitude and the contemplation of nature (as it seems to), it occurred to us that we could do a service for budding sages equal to that done for budding adolescents by Hugh Hefner lo these many years ago when he introduced the Playboy centerfold. Hefner knew his audience. He knew the needs of his audience. As a replacement for grainy black and white French postcards, he gave that audience a big, three-panel color photograph once a month. Judging from the rising circulation figures for Playboy in its early decades, both Hefner and his audience hit the jackpot, so to speak. There seems little doubt that both the frequency and the quality of young male masturbation around the world increased greatly thanks to the Playboy centerfold. Thinking that we know our audience (high intelligence combined with high curiosity and a certain edge of weirdness), we decided it was time for zen centerfolds, images to help those in need of scratching the itch of metaphysical horniness. At first, trapped in old, print-technology thinking, we tried to come up with some kind of animation whereby an image would "unfold" sort of like a Playboy centerfold unfolds. A clever, free-thinking staffer pointed out the quaintness of that approach and suggested a pixel approach. Which is what you will see: a metaphysically lascivious image that at first is highly pixelized and then gradual increases in resolution until... SATISFACTION AND TOTAL RELEASE. WARNING & DISCLAIMER
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