The Sporadic Curmudgeon

We have suddenly found out that someone in my immediate family has a very dangerous spinal condition and is now scheduled for emergency surgery Tuesday morning. Please keep us in your thoughts if you are so inclined. I’ll write more after it’s all resolved.

If you know me contact me by ICQ and I’ll be able to give more details.

This evening I experienced something truly odd, and although my wife has dismissed it as a symptom of stress, I am not entirely sure. Here is what happened:

It was getting late, and I didn’t feel like driving to the grocery store, so I decided to make do with whatever I could find laying around.

Spaghetti? Yep.

Olive oil? Yep.

Parmesan? Yep.

Fresh garlic?

We store our garlic in a little unglazed terracotta jar. It has always been in the corner of the counter to the left of the stove, and holds one or two cloves. But it wasn’t where it was supposed to be. I looked behind the bags of flour tortillas and half-loaves of bread; it just wasn’t there. I opened the cabinets and looked around. No garlic jar.

“Hey, hon,” I said. “Where’s the garlic container? Did you move it?”

“No,” she said. “It was broken in the move from Las Vegas.”

“What? Really? Are you sure?”

“Yes. I dropped it when I was packing the kitchen.”

And she was right, of course. We keep the garlic in the cabinet.

But — I remember using that garlic jar since we moved to North Carolina. I’ve fished garlic out of it dozens of times, and it’s always been in the corner to the left of the stove.

In reality I have not actually used that garlic jar since the move, and right now it’s in a landfill in Nevada.

What I want to know is this: why, after having been in this apartment for five months and cooking who knows how many meals would I suddenly start looking for a non-existent garlic jar? Why this particular meal? Why on earth would I abruptly forget that I’ve been keeping the garlic in the cabinet all along?

Furthermore, why would I know exactly where the garlic jar normally was in the North Carolina kitchen, when it was never in North Carolina, and more importantly not in the same place I kept it in Las Vegas? In Nevada, the garlic jar was closer to the sink than to the stove, by about three feet.

I guess what I’m asking is, why was my memory of the North Carolina version of the garlic jar so damned normal? If it never existed, why the hell was I looking for it? This isn’t like forgetting something; it’s more like being jerked from one version of reality, where the garlic jar was never broken, to another where it broke in Las Vegas.

Objectively, I realize that this is just some sort of memory malfunction; a misfiring set of neurons or something. Subjectively, it feels disconcertingly like the past changed.

The odd thing is that I have run across a description of this exact phenomenon before. Philip K. Dick wrote about it in one of his best novels, Time Out of Joint. Here is the relevant passage:

He still had not found the light cord that dangled in the darkness of the bathroom. His nausea and irritation grew, and he began thrashing around in the dark, holding up both arms, hands together with thumbs extended and touching; he rotated his hands in a wide circle. His head smacked against the corner of the medicine cabinet and he cursed.

“Are you okay?” Margo called. “What happened?”

“I can’t find the light cord,” he said, furious now, wanting to get his pill and get back to play his hand. The innate propensity of objects to be evasive . . . and then suddenly it came to him that there was no light cord. There was a switch on the wall, at shoulder level, by the door. At once he found it, snapped it on, and got his bottle of pills from the cabinet. A second later he had filled a tumbler with water, taken the pill, and come hurrying out of the bathroom.

Why did I remember a light cord? he asked himself. A specific cord, hanging a specific distance down, at a specific place.

I wasn’t groping around randomly. As I would in a strange bathroom. I was hunting for a light cord I had pulled many times. Pulled enough to set up a reflex response in my involuntary nervous system.

Dick believed that these occurrences were a sort of glitch in the space-time continuum, and were evidence of a point where one universe branched off from another due to something having changed in the past. He talked about it at length in his speech If You Find This World Bad, You Should See Some of the Others.

I submit to you that such alterations, the creation or selection of such so-called “alternate presents,” is continually taking place. The very fact that we can conceptually deal with this notion — that is, entertain it as an idea — is a first step in discerning such processes themselves. But I doubt if we will ever be able in any real fashion to demonstrate, to scientifically prove, that such lateral change processes do occur. Probably all we would have to go on would be vestiges of memory, fleeting impressions, dreams, nebulous intuitions that somehow things had been different in some way — and not long ago but now. We might reflexively reach for a light switch in the bathroom only to discover that it was — always had been — in another place entirely. We might reach for the air vent in our car where there was no air vent — a reflex left over from a previous present, still active at a subcortical level.

Of course, if the current theory that there’s a one-in-five chance that we’re all living in a synthetic universe holds, then what I experienced a few hours ago might be more of a software bug than a kink in space-time.

Who knows? Maybe time-travellers from the future have messed up yesterday. Or just maybe, as my wife tells me, I’ve got some neurons misfiring due to rivet-popping “I cannah hold’er, Cap’n” stress.

All I know is that this evening I honestly believed I got my garlic from a terracotta jar beside the oven, even though that’s clearly wrong. Memory hiccup or an artifact from a timeline shift or some other damn thing: something’s gone wonky and it makes me very uncomfortable.

Special PKD Update: Elsewhere in If You Find This World Bad, You Should See Some of the Others, Dick talks about overlapping universes:

There cannot be one because, of course, as we all know, such a concept is merely a fictional premise; none of us, in our right minds, entertains for even an instant the notion that such alternate universes exist in any actual sense. But let us say, just for fun, that they do. Then, if they do, how are they linked to each other, if in fact they are (or would be) linked? If you drew a map of them, showing their locations, what would the map look like? For instance (and I think this is a very important question), are they absolutely separate one from another, or do they overlap? Because if they overlap, then such problems as “Where do they exist?” and “How do you get from one to the next?” admit to a possible solution. I am saying, simply, if they do indeed exist, and if they do indeed overlap, then we may in some literal, very real sense inhabit several of them to various degrees at any given time. And although we all see one another as living humans walking about and talking and acting, some of us may inhabit relatively greater amounts of, say, Universe One than the other people do; and some of us may inhabit relatively greater amounts of Universe Two, Track Two, instead, and so on. It may not merely be that our subjective impressions of the world differ, but there may be an overlapping, a superimposition, of a number of worlds so that objectively, not subjectively, our worlds may differ. Our perceptions differ as a result of this.

Personally, I believe that this is quite literally true, and verified by the one-photon-at-a-time version of the Double-slit experiment. Some quantum physicists take a bullshit wishy-washy wave interpretation of the experiment. Me, I side with the second-smartest guy of the 20th century, Richard Feynman, who said that until they’re observed photons take every possible path through space-time to get from point A to point B, which points toward multiple universes. I’m talking about a man that helped build the first atomic bomb, taught himself Portuguese on a plane flight from LA to Brazil, won the Nobel Prize for his theory of quantum electrodynamics, and figured out a foolproof method of picking up women at a bar. Clearly a God amongst men.

The smartest was Einstein, of course, who also had an eye for the ladies. In programming terms:

if($iq > $edward_teller)
{
$tail += $sinatra;
}

do not ever eat
sauerkraut and grilled bratwurst
if you might vomit

Special explanatory note: This bad haiku was not actually composed while I was sitting on the toilet. It was composed while I was kneeling in front of the toilet.

Right this minute, I’m watching a show on the History Channel called Lost Worlds. I am horrified. At least the Discovery Channel’s “Scorpion King” bullshit didn’t actually damage archaeological sites.

The episode is called “Kama Sutra,” and is supposed to give an overview of ancient Hindu culture, although the depiction is about as confused as it’s possible to be without veering into Bizarro World. That’s not what’s got me so upset. I’m used to ancient history taking it right on the lingam.

Four times now, one of the show’s “archaeologists” or “expert stonemasons” have altered historical artifacts or treated them carelessly:

1. The “archaeologist” lays down on some delicate sandstone carvings, supporting herself directly on the intricately-carved edges while she blathers on about how “you can see this guy’s little belt.” Yes, she planted the entire weight of an adult human on thousand-year-old sandstone carvings only a half-inch thick.
    
2. The “expert stonemason” is demonstrating how the ancient stonecarving tools were used. Never mind that he uses a modern steel point and mallet. He shows the strokes used by “gently” hitting the point with the mallet on an ancient stone! Even though he’s deliberately trying to strike softly, you can see and hear that his strikes make marks. For a damned television program, this buffoon literally chiseled pieces off of an historic relic.
    
3. Later, in a debris field, this same “expert stonemason” picks up fragments of a destroyed temple to see if they fit together. The debris field of an archaeological site. Could the orientation of those fragments have someday told us something important? Who knows?
    
4. To “test the theory” that the site once consisted of 85 temples, as opposed to the thirty or so still standing, the “archaeologist” goes poking around in the brush. She finds some shaped stones poking out of a mound, and begins digging with her hands. Tossing the dirt from side to side, she uncovers a sculpture “that hasn’t been seen for a thousand years.” I wonder if there was anything important in the layer of soil that she flung into the underbrush?

Now, these aren’t as bad as Heinrich Schliemann’s trenches at Hisarlik (Troy), but Jeez. This is the 21st century, not the 19th. If you’re going to have a TV show dedicated to lost worlds, maybe you shouldn’t be the ones destroying the artifacts.

Oh, and History Channel? If a tourguide tells you something in one scene, it’s not kosher to call it your archaeologist’s “discovery” in the next.

Marilyn, Marilyn, Marilyn.

I mean, really. First you rip off David Bowie’s eye shtick, and now they’re saying you’ve been stealing from your bandmates to purchase human remains?

I know your career isn’t exactly zinging along lately, but the whole “pale sexually-disgusting washed-up freak musician buys skeleton” thing is kind of old-hat. Admittedly, the theft aspect is a nice touch, but still. What’s next, fondling an underage chimpanzee in a hyperbaric chamber?

Besides, you don’t have to steal. It’s not like human remains are scarce or anything. There are whole countries where they’re just scattered around all over the place.

As I posted on Ain’t It Cool News:

Because Western Civilization just can’t sink any lower. To whoever came up with the whole “Bratz” crap: Thank you so fucking much for spending millions of dollars telling our daughters it’s a Good Thing to be a slutty high-maintenance materialistic bitch. We just can’t have enough 13-year-old hookers! You’ve made your contribution to society. Now please go kill yourself painfully, you goddamned pustule. Rot in hell, assholes.

Now that I am no longer in the heat of the moment I realize, of course, that the plural “assholes” does not jibe with the singular “yourself” or “pustule.” I ask you: what’s more important? My grammar, or the fact that a bunch of evil soulless corporate golems are trying to convince little girls that it’s cool to be a greedy vapid skank who would happily blow a sailor for something shiny?

Oh, I get it now. The movie is saying that being a filthy money-hungry whore is “empowerment.”

Sweet Mother of Jesus, I hate these bastards. Every dollar they make should give them another cancer cell.

Outraged Update: Someone calling him/herself “half vader” has attempted to deflect criticism of the Bratz movie thusly:

You Bratz haters are just mad “the gays” took over your beloved Barbie.

My well-reasoned response: (man, it’s great having your own blog!)

We “Bratz haters” do not suspect “the gays” as having taken over our beloved Barbie. For one thing, Barbie never looks like she pays for lunch by sucking off winos in the alley. Bratz are a profoundly misogynistic pedophilic wet dream, and whoever thought them up is just an evil twisted fuck, pure and simple. If you can’t see that, well, you’re culturally blind. Sorry, but it’s true.

Why the hell do I even have to point this shit out? Jeez… wake up.