An Oldie From Another Reality Looping Back in the Walla Walla Timeline

Omens portend strange. Omens at the time in which we see Rosetta have been portending strange for several months, so much so that one could believe the whole world slid sideways into an alternate reality but, because they could still shop, nobody much noticed. That will change about the time the CERN people acknowledge that this alternate reality did in fact take up residence in our experience, though perhaps “slid sideways” will not be thought the most apt wording, but they can’t undo it, so we’d best prepare to surf the rising tides of chaos. They’ll never say any of this.

Of course, people notice strange happenings in the way that they usually do, but things are already so strange that the very word “strange” has lost all resonance with the events. This should tell you that the strange has been rising for a very long time. Longer than the collider has been in operation. Truths be told, the Hadron, was, itself a permutation of the strangetide.

This is a time in which a clown apocalypse barely evokes comment. It makes the news and semi-news and celebrity news and fake news, alongside many other occurrences that may or may not have happened or may have happened in vastly different ways, or maybe by now are remembered differently. Even historically factual events are so ridiculous as to rob absurdity of even a snicker. There is that reality show where the main creature’s deriérre implant ruptures during the making of an “amateur” video. The video is leaked to the wilds of the internets at the end of the season. The creature, is, it is now agreed, a trans-galactic hologram from outside the Milky Way.

This is a season of madness. The clowns start killing people the month before the kangaroo election. The clown king nacho cheese tycoon, runs against robotic piñata head with googlie eyes. The piñata head is promising free injections of mind control horchata, which many think is also nirvana. The clown king wins but only by dropping a few anvils and pianos which he also refuses to pay for because they are broken after somehow being dropped even though nobody can tell how the anvils are broken. Secret agents smoke strange smelling cigarettes in dark alleys. There are UFO sightings from Tulsa to Portland to Constantanople but nobody can believe what they see because they are told it's impossible. The fortuneteller says things that will be studiously ignored until we collectively find ourselves, like Orson Welles at the end of Touch of Evil, before Marlene Dietrich, who says through her face as Delphic oracle: “your future’s all used up.” This is the ecosystem we find ourselves in. This is the ecosystem in which unicorns are born for real.

Maybe it isn’t that things are any stranger than they ever really have been. The world changes when one notices the world.