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Thursday, June 12, 2008

A Stranger Encounter

There is a house in Burlington, VT that is an underground hotspot for local drug addicts and your basic townie burnouts. The place is an old Victorian style building that is dilapidated in a used rustic sort of way. There are always people coming and going and on any given day there will be someone new crashing on one the couches.

To my knowledge, there are at least two drugs present at all times: pot and low-grade coke. I’ve been brought here several times by certain disreputable people I occasionally associate with, evidently enough times for the kid who legitimately lives there to recognize my face and feel accustomed to my presence.

One evening a friend and I stopped by this place to see about getting high before heading over to a predictably lame kegger going on across town. Turned out, the place was dried out but we just happened to have entered the room at precisely the right moment, as some heady shit was being fired up. We were invited to partake, which we graciously did.

I sat down on the bed next to a small futon that this obscure character, whom I recognized from previous visits, was perched upon. Making myself comfortable I proceeded to strike up a conversation with this strange looking man, if for nothing more than a lack of anything better to do.

He was middle aged, and wore thick glasses on his egg shaped head with strange locks of hair that weren’t exactly dreads. He reminded me of a familiar cartoon character; something out of futurama.

At first, conversation was bland and I could hardly care enough about it to keep it going. Then I mentioned something about the lighting, which set him off on a soliloquy of the most abstract, contemporary, scientific theories; the type that are written about in the backs of alternative science journals.

He explained how “Objective reality does not exist, and that despite its apparent solidity the universe is at heart a phantasm, a gigantic and splendidly detailed hologram.”

I was actually startled by this unexpected outburst and searched the rest of the room to see if anyone else had noticed. The others were too absorbed in their own confabulations to have noticed or cared.

“I’m sorry, what was that?” I asked.

“Well…” he said. “The apparent faster-than-light connection between subatomic particles is really telling us that there is a deeper level of reality we are not privy to, a more complex dimension beyond our own that is…”

He continued in this manner and as I watched his eyes bug in and out of his bobbing head I felt a strange sensation that I had somehow entered a scene out of the animated film “Waking Life”.

“…in addition to its phantomlike nature, such a universe would possess other rather startling features. If the apparent separateness of subatomic particles is illusory, it means that at a deeper level of reality all things in the universe are infinitely interconnected.”

He took a deep pull from what was left of the joint, and I examined the smoke as it began to spiral upward into a more visual explanation of what I thought he might have been saying.

“Even time and space can no longer be viewed as fundamentals.” He continued. “Because concepts such as location break down in a universe in which nothing is truly separate from anything else, time and three-dimensional space would have to be viewed as projections of this deeper order. At its deeper level, reality is a sort of super-hologram in which the past, present, and future all exist simultaneously. This suggests that given the proper tools it might even be possible to someday reach into the super-holographic level of reality and pluck out scenes from the long-forgotten past.”

I couldn’t believe my ears. Who the hell is this person? Where did he come from? He began to look more and more alien to me, until I finally asked him where it was that he came from.

He said that he was from Connecticut but that he is always in and out of town.

“Where in town is it that you stay?” I asked.

Then, somewhat reluctantly he admitted to me that he stays “…here and there” though usually, he said, he sleeps here on one of the couches.

The whole time we spoke the image of this person in my head had been forming and reforming until finally it was completely shattered and I was left confused and with an empty feeling somewhat resembling sadness. I started to wonder where people like him come from; Connecticut apparently. Thinking this over, I looked around and wondered what the other people there were like. Were they from Connecticut too? They all seemed to be relating to each other on the same level. I began to feel more and more like I was the alien. Eventually I was forced to leave, whether from paranoia or melancholy I’m still not certain.

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