Where in the secret to life the universe and everything is revealed. Who says entertaining writing has to have a story, or a plot? Why can't it be just a stream of consciousness, some interesting episodes from one's life, some regrets revisited, s...
"In an infinite multiverse, there is no such thing as fiction."
~ Scott Adsit
I am at an art exhibit with Steve an older, and wiser recent acquaintance of mine. Some engineers hang out in bars, but there is at least one group that hangs out on Saturdays in an art gallery in South Lake Tahoe. The booze is free (No doubt to lubricate the wallets of the patrons.), so are the hors d'oeuvres, the paintings on the other hand are very expensive, but the engineers here can afford them. We come to socialize with each other, the featured artists of the week, and the great staff of art consultants.
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The above is a picture Lisa took of us in the engineers' corner. The gallery staff sets it aside for us every Saturday. Notice the small plaques on the wall that say, "Joe's place" and "Pierre's place." We are checking out copies of "Dr. Seuss Goes to War" that the Gallery gave us. I'm on the left, my friend Pierre is on the right, and my dog is the one on the floor. You can tell we are engineers because we don't dress up and we are wearing white socks.
The consultants include my personal art consultant Whiskey Wheels, AKA Starbuckle13. She is a roller-skating bass guitarist when she is not helping us select works of art. Let me be clear she actually plays her bass while roller skating. As if I haven't already provided enough proof that reality is stranger than fiction, at the top of this chapter is a video of one of her performances for those of you who think I make this stuff up.
Back on topic, we are standing around, admiring the new art, and chatting when Steve who is frequently expounding on one of his many fields of expertise misremembers something from one of our earlier encounters. I tease him saying he is experiencing a senior moment. He says no, it is just that he is recalling the incident as it occurred in one of the many other parallel universes of the multiverse.
I'm pretty sure Steve is joking. Only this is not the first time I've considered the possibility that our consciousnesses flit between the parallel universes of the multiverse as an explanation of inconsistent memories. It is, however, the first time that I have heard someone else suggest it. I laugh, but an uneasy feeling begins creeping over me. Is this an epiphany? Is this the universe in its love of irony confronting me with the truth that my consciousness is indeed alternating between universes? Am I alternating between a universe in which I am dead and one in which I am writing on Wattpad?
The first evidence I had of a multiverse was several years ago when my friend Roger told me he had seen my headstone in a cemetery in a neighboring town. Roger is not the most reliable of sources so I really didn't pay it much mind. Yes, this is the same Roger who set my pants on fire with a Roman candle and nearly electrocuted me with my science project and on whom I based the pot smoking Roger in my Sharing Afflictions trilogy; so, you can understand my reluctance to give much credence to his statements.
Many years later, not sure how many because as you will soon learn time has become significantly distorted for me. Anyway, sometime later the love of my life is doing genealogy research on line and she comes across an obituary in the newspaper of the town where my grandparents lived for a while and where Roger said he had seen my grave. The obituary bore my name, Charles Upton Farley, III. I know there are and have been other Charles Upton Farleys - my father and grandfather just to name two. But this one was also a third! In addition, the obit gave brief bios of the father and grandfather of the deceased and they were without question my father and grandfather. Cue Twilight Zone music.
Assuming you have not spent the last twenty years in a coma or out of body, you have probably heard of "the multiverse" or parallel universes theory. The multiverse theory speculates that there could exist an infinite number of alternate realities. Parallel universes are created whenever something can occur in two different ways. At this point the universe diverges into two universes each supporting one of the possibilities. Clearly this ultimately leads to an infinite number of universes. While infinite is often an incomprehensible concept for us, the multiverse just doesn't care. Even so, I still think there are forces in place that try to prevent too many inconsistencies between the multiple universes and thus limit the total number. I suspect these forces came in to play as the following explanation emerged for my obituary.
We discovered that unbeknownst to me my father had been married prior to his marriage to my mother. He and his first wife had a son, the first Charles Upton Farley, III. That Charles died as a baby. A few years after that, the United States declared war on Japan and my father went to fight in the Pacific. My father's first wife divorced him while he was fighting overseas. After the war my father married my mother. My sister was born a year later. Four years later I was born.
I realize now the toll that the war, the death of his first child, and the divorce from his first wife must have taken on my father. My father was the only son of a very successful civil engineer, but he saw his father lose everything in the great depression just as his father before him lost everything in the American Civil War. I think the collapse of my father's own construction business and bankruptcy must have been the final straw that drove him to become an alcoholic. So, although I was born to an aristocratic southern family, I was born into a life of poverty and discord. Also, I realize now having blamed my father for so long for this poverty and discord, that I owe him an apology. Unfortunately, I learned all this long after his passing. Perhaps I'll run into him in an afterlife or in an alternate reality and can give him my apology, but will it even matter then?
In short, I am the second Charles Upton Farley, III. A simple explanation, but how is it I knew nothing about this part of my father's past until it became convenient for the multiverse to provide this information to resolve the inconsistency of my being both dead and alive? How is it the investigators for my security clearances never questioned that my identity was the same as a child that had died as a baby? I think the universe may have slipped up here and not completely covered its tracks.
I now inhabit a universe where I live in a large house with a 360-degree view of one of the most beautiful places on the planet. I take my dog for a walk every morning in a gorgeous national forest just behind my house. On weekends I go to art exhibits, drink mimosas, snack on hors d'oeuvres and chat with engineers. This is definitely not the universe I was born into. It is much more likely a universe I would die into. Yep, I'm definitely dead. QED. And, if you are still not convinced, there are even more explanations that leads to this same conclusion.
