Recently I had an eye appointment. The optometrist informed me she’d never met anyone with eyes of such radically differing prescriptions.

My most recent optometrist appointment was about eight years back, and getting an update on my eyes’ status had been bugging me for ages. For my right eye is Lazy. The medical term is amblyopia: it means that for one of several reasons, one’s brain downplays or even totally disregards the neural input from at least one eye. In my case it’s a slight deformation of my right eye’s shape. It’s long-sighted. It’s out of focus.

This produces two ocular phenomena. And they battle each other.

First, the out-of-focus: my vision through Eye Right appears fuzzy and translucent. It’s like someone’s filming a raunchy 1970s Playboy Magazine photo shoot and gone for the classic softcore technique of smearing Vaseline over the camera lens. If I close my left eye, the world goes sepia and shimmery and I’m mentally whisked away to that scene in Austin Powers 2 where Doctor Evil takes just one sip of Austin Powers’s mojo and then simply must seduce Frau Farbissina.

But this produces a perverse neural knock-on. I think my brain becomes slightly Puritan, or at least that bit of it responsible for vision processing. It decides it’ll instead neurally favour my left eye and downplay my right. To some extent, everyone’s got a dominant versus non-dominant eye, though in my case the effect is so severe that my right eye’s processing is seriously starved for neurons and cognitive bandwidth. Low bitrate. My right eye’s vision thus also appears … “glitchy”. Imagine one of those ‘90s organised-crime documentaries where its makers interview an endless conveyor belt of Mafia whistleblowers, with their faces pixellated and their voices garbled to maintain precious anonymity. Incredibly pixellated. The doco video devolves into twinkly squares the size of dinner plates. The doco itself throbs with the dark thrill of taboo. You’re listening to what you imagine to be alleyway shootouts and horse heads in beds and drug busts and vicious courtroom dramas, but can barely actually see diddly. It’s maddening. It’s infuriating. It’s my right eye’s daily existence.

Now picture both phenomena battling each other. We’re talking Pablo Escobar in fishnets and corsets and dancing the Mamushka. We’re talking Hugh Hefner out-scar-face-ing Scarface. We’re talking both gents forever locked in a series of vicious cognitive kung fu contests. Merely closing my left eye immediately transports me to front-row seats forever. It’s grand fun and all, but its unrelenting chronicness has a tendency to muck up my everyday life, you know? Naturally I had to seek an optometrist’s counsel for advice on dealing with ol’ Escobar and Hefner.

I thus popped along to Johnsonville Specsavers. I figured it might be an idea to maybe not rattle off this spiel in its entirety and mention Escobar and Hefner by name, and instead I enquired after more conventional advice and a standard eye checkup.

Result: turns out my left eye is perfect. Zero prescription detected or necessary. Scientists kept crashing the optometrist's appointment, asking if they could study my left eye for posterity. My right eye remains long-sighted to the point where I could probably make good money hiring myself out to paparazzi as one of those hideously-long-zoom cameras for snapping celeb photos without their consent, if I felt so corruptly inclined and/or wasn’t already earning a pretty penny from web dev. Different scientists kept asking if they could study my right eye, but in the same way that scientists study Ozzy Osbourne because they're befuddled at how his decades of drug usage haven't killed him.

My two eyes thus give me two distinct visions of the world. Through my left eye I behold crystal-sharp video of boring ol’ reality. Through my right eye I view translucent, glitched-out Found Footage of every crap ‘80s action movie. These overlap. My right eye’s performance yet remains high enough to allow stereo vision, and keep the objects from each video feed in roughly the same ocular location, but it’s far from perfect. They wander. My left eye’s dominance means I don’t really notice the right eye’s image-wandering unless I’m paying conscious attention, but when I do, it’s rather noticeable. My left eye’s crystal-sharp images have shimmery haloes of sex and drugs and rock and roll.

I’d been wondering about getting a contact lens or reading glasses, or maybe even a monocle. Turns out no. There’s this Thing called neuroplasticity. Long story short, if you upgrade the quality of one’s eye inputs with glasses and suchlike, the brain’s vision processing-bits adapt to match. They’re plastic. And this adaptation diminishes with age. Right now, at age 39, sure, I could absolutely wear reading glasses for my right eye, and this would fix the ocular out-of-focus effect. No more sepia Vaseline and Hefner. But the second effect, the neural glitchy bitrate Mafia effect, would persist. The eyeglass itself would strengthen my right eye’s image all right, so the optometrist informed me, and if I’d done this as a kid, my childlike neuroplasticity would compensate pronto and all would be well, but attempting this at 39 merely means that my brain would balk and my strengthened right-eye debauchery halo would persist forever. Also Specsavers haven’t made monocles in decades.