With a Bit of a Mind Flip, You're into the Time Slip

Ever feel like you're living in a very odd, alternate reality? Sometimes it seems I've fallen into Frederik Pohl's There Will Be Time or Richard Bach's One, or anything by Philip K. Dick. I have the niggling suspicion that I took a wrong turn, or a thousand wrong turns, and every subsequent action further tangles the continuum. Eh. Maybe it's just PMS.

Whatever it is, it's accompanied by a sort of "waiting for the other shoe to drop" anxiety, as if at any moment the curtain will be pulled back (or the false skin on the prophet's mutant face) and the wrongness of it all will come spilling out like a pile of maggots on a sloughing corpse. Yeah, I'm in a mood.

I suppose writing until 2:00 a.m. and sleeping until 10:00 a.m. and waking with a massive sinus headache to a dismally grey fogged-in May morning hasn't particularly helped my state of mind. Also, the fact that I want to finish the novel I'm working on, finish my novella's pre-edits, and finish up three months' worth of work projects before I leave for my cruise next week may be putting a tad bit of pressure on me. Without pressure, though, I accomplish nothing.

Still, it isn't just today. It's that on days like today it's impossible to ignore the idea that everything around me is a prop in an elaborate farce. I used to think about that a lot as a kid. Sitting in church, where I got all of my weird, creative ideas as my mind wandered away from the pulpit, I would look around and think, "What if none of this is really happening? What if I'm not really here, not really doing any of this, and everyone else is in on it?" And then I'd think, "What if I'm just a memory of this moment?" And I am, now—or at least the ten-year-old me having that thought is. And that's pretty unnerving.

Bah. I think I'll go get some coffee and set off another hundred alternate realities, and leave the rest of this to Stephen Hawking.