The something that deviates from what is standard, normal, or expected. An anomaly. Those peculiarities in life. Fluctuations from the standard conventions.
A few days ago, on New Year’s Eve, a whole bunch of people were on top of a high mountainside peak near Albuquerque, New Mexico. Someone, much earlier, had decided to build a restaurant up there. It has become a popular tourist location. And there they gathered.
To get off the top of that mountain, they must take a tram. Either way, really. Up or down, the only way to the restaurant, a trip that “normally” takes about 15 minutes. But, it was icy and snowing, as it sometimes does on mountain tops. At any rate, the tramway became jammed. Stuck. Two cars were immobile, in fact.
One of those cars was filled with 20 passengers. The other had only one rider. They were all restaurant staff and employees, according to the news. I think the guy in the car by himself must have been the manager.
Anyway. They were stuck overnight. I can’t imagine that this must have been much fun to ring in the New Year this way. There must have been male and female riders alike. I only think of this because on most nights, I have to get up and pee at least twice. I am thinking this was probably an awkward situation in a tram car packed with 20 people.
This is a good lesson, I think, for eating in low, low places.
But. This was out of the ordinary. An anomaly. An irregularity. A quirk.
I wonder about anomalies. I do. I wonder why we turn on the faucet in the kitchen sink one hundred times, and things go just fine. But on that one occasion, a lonely spoon lies in waiting at the bottom of the sink, creating the perfect trajectory, where the faucet water hits, and angles out all over our freshly pressed hoodies.
These rarities happen all the time. Last night, I was in bed, reading. I stopped for a moment to check my phone, as it sent a little sound signal to me, alerting me that someone, somewhere else on the planet, had just sent me a text. It was of no concern, really. And then, another notification dropped down on my screen. This time, of the Facebook variety. It appeared my Aunt Janet was sending me a friend request. “Hard to do,” I thought. My Aunt Janet has been dead for nearly two years.
Another anomaly. Or was it? As I mentioned, I wonder about those occasions in life when the thing occurs. It causes us to say — sometimes out loud — “My. That’s odd.”
I just finished a book called “The Midnight Library” by Matt Haig. In it, the character is introduced to her lives. All of them. It seems they are all happening at once, and each one is driven differently by the decisions she had made over time. There is a “Book of Regrets” fueling the entire matter. Parallel lives in parallel universes. Might it be possible that we have such lives?
And I wondered once again about anomalies.
I put my phone back on its charger, which sits on my nightstand.
Even my nightstand, it seems, has multiple lives. I mean, during the day, it works just as well as it does at night. But we never switch the name to day stand.
Same with day beds. You can sleep on them just fine at night. But they are never called night beds. Two lives, it seems.
No. They both keep their same names, even though the time and the situation changes. Like us, in our multiple lives. Perhaps.
Quantum theorists studying the fourth dimension propose that time can bend, allowing us to glimpse the future. Maybe we have precognitions. Glimpses. Anomalies Take Abraham Lincoln, for instance. He reported having a dream in which he had seen his own dead body. Only days later, he was fatally shot.
And here we are. All together in this life, this world, at this very moment. Living our individual lives. And every decision we make turns our paths in yet another direction. Sometimes they go bump. And we see the blip in the matrix.
Like peeing on the tram car.
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“We are an impossibility in an impossible universe.”
― Ray Bradbury
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“The Universe is under no obligation to make sense to you.”
― Neil deGrasse Tyson
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“Nothing happens until something moves.”
― Albert Einstein
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The unexepected parts of the MultiVerse.
