Waiter, my reality check, please!

I must type this with frenzied fingers, so please pardon my typos and grammar blunders.

As some of you may know, I’ve spent the past two weeks drugged up and waiting for a kidney stone the size of a manhole cover to drop out of my bladder. This amount of free time, coupled with the steady influx of narcotics into my system, has allowed me to get a glimpse (albeit a fleeting glimpse) of the big picture. The really, really big picture that people are always talking about.

The truth of the matter, (and I’m talking about the really big truth here—so very big that you might want to sit down on a carpeted floor and perhaps call your priest, pastor or other spiritual advisor and put them on hold) is that the world as we know it (or the momentary plane of reality that we currently occupy) is centered in the mind of my next door neighbor’s dog.

This theory first came to me four or five days ago and since then I’ve filled nearly a dozen spiral-bound notebooks with observations. My findings are rock solid.

Everyone knows that the universe is a multi-layered, multi-dimensional smorgasbord of alternate realities. There are trillions of billions of existences out there, and most theoretical physicists towed the company line that each of us created our own worlds based solely on our own select observations.

But that’s wrong. For some unconceivable reason our reality is hinged on the perceptions of Trixie, my neighbor’s German Shepard mix.

The reason I have to write this so quickly is because she’s sleeping and things tend to stay put while she naps. But once she wakes, anything goes.

Because of the steady influx of drugs into my system, coupled with altered sleep patterns, it seems that I’m able to tune into the changes that the world undergoes in the blink of her eye. Things as we know them are torn down and rebuilt so fast we never know the difference. This includes massive false memories, which is part of the reason we never suspect the changes. Earlier this morning I was a sous-chef in a small bistro in Spokane, and before that I was a dust mote in the library in Alexandria. I’m pretty certain that I started the day as a question mark in a joke on the Humor in Uniform page of the September 1974 issue of Reader’s Digest.

And now I find that I’m a fat, bald, occasionally employed writer with a delightful wife and daughter, living on California’s Central Coast. With the exception of the kidney stone (which can only be compared to having a length of rusty barbed wire yanked down through your urinary tract). this is pretty nice and I could get used to it, but I’m sure that as soon as Trixie wakes reality will fluctuate and in a flash I’ll be a rusted 9 volt battery in the Staten Island landfill, and then a strip of Velcro on a sexy maid Halloween costume, and then a secretly gay gardener on an agricultural space ship orbiting Neptune, and so on and so on.

I like the way things are right now and I think I know a way to keep them the way they are. It’s risky but I’m going to give it a go.

I think the only way to keep things status quo is to go outside, sneak up on Trixie, and hit her on the head with a hammer. I figure that way we’ll stay locked into this steam of reality.

If the next time we meet it’s the 13th century and we’re a couple of plankton stuck in the back of the throat of a Bowhead Whale, I guess it would be safe to say I failed.

Wish me luck!