It must be a very limiting thing, this seeing

I try to pay attention to what's going on around me and consider myself a reasonably observant person... usually... at least about some things. A notable exception being when I was waiting to board the airport bus from the BART station in Oakland, on my way to Boston a couple months ago. It was only after the police came up that I realized the commotion was not just other travelers jostling for position, but that the well-dressed man a few people in front of me had just had his wallet stolen at knife point. So I was sort of dangerously oblivious there.

I also have pretty good peripheral vision, which is handy when you're trying to pay attention to your surroundings. And I don't turn my iPod up so loud that I can't hear what's going on too (I just pretend I can't hear the panhandlers).

Anyway, so this morning I'm walking to work and as I cross a street, looking both directions for traffic, I notice this tall beared black guy totally pimped out up ahead about to intersect my path. He's wearing a flawless brown bell-bottomed western-cut suit, a curled cowboy hat tilted at a jaunty angle, and shiny boots. I pass him without glancing over, but hear his footsteps and am aware out of the corner of my eye that he turned and is right beside/behind me.

Mind you, I hadn't seen anyone else on our side of the sidewalk, so it came as a total shock when, moments later, it was a white woman who passes me, wearing jeans and a cute brown camisole/jacket combo, her kitten heels matching the footfalls I was hearing. I was so startled, in fact, that I turned around to see what had happened to the guy in the suit. It was equally jarring that he was nowhere to be seen.

Now, it was quite impossible for him to have simply disappeared, yet it was equally impossible for him to have gone anywhere out of eyesite given his initial trajectory and the short space of time that had passed. But the fact remains that he was gone and this woman had appeared out of thin air in exactly the place all my senses and stream of continuity told me he should be.

This completely freaked me out. The whole way to work I was going over it in my head, all the possibilities equally disconcerting. Did I just hallucinate the pimped-out guy? Did I just not notice that he ducked into an alley while this woman was coming up behind me the whole time? If I could be that inattentive, how have I not been hit by a bus by now?

The conclusion I'm sticking to is that I just witnessed a momentary overlap between two of the infinite alternate universes, and that my continuity just happened to flow from one into another rather seamlessly. A wrinkle in the fabric of space-time? A slip in the timestream? A transparency in the multiverse? This is not as crazy as it may seem. Honest.

I'm convinced I've witnessed these things before. For example, back on the farm when I was briefly into making and firing model rockets, I had a little cardboard and balsa-wood rocket that, instead of blasting a parachute, simply blew out a side hole, starting the rocket on a turbulent drag-inducing spin that brought it back to the ground unharmed, whistling in the wind the whole way down. We even painted it day-glo orange the better to recover it. After several successful firings, the thing vanished. We could see it spiraling down, a tiny dot in the sky followed by a little trail of smoke and the faint whistle, and the next instant it was gone. The only logical explanation: it was whisked away in wrinkle between worlds. We scoured the ground for an hour and never found the bright orange rocket body. I think clothes dryers also tend to be vectors of plurality, what with all the missing socks and extra t-shirts.

Or maybe I should just start paying more attention.