Did You See That?

 

When Ter and I were last at the mall, I noticed a car in the parking lot. It stood by itself in a space at the end of the row and was absolutely nothing to get excited about, except that it sported the name and website address of a business I’d not heard of before.

It was still there when we emerged with our purchases. As we passed it en route to the Tiguan, I glanced once more at the website address and remarked to Ter: “I wonder what the Metaphysical Academy is all about.”

“I was just wondering the same thing,” she replied.

“Then you saw it too?”

She nodded. “Yup.”

“That’s a relief,” I said. “That means the car is actually here, in this dimension.”

“Or we’re there, in that dimension,” she countered.

“As in we saw it but the space is empty to everyone else?”

“Sure,” she allowed, still walking. “If you think you see it, it’s there. If you don’t, it’s not.”

“Or,” I suggested, “it could be sitting in another dimension and we only saw it because we passed through the divide.”

She laughed. “And the light was coming from a certain direction.”

We kept walking, but neither of us glanced back. From that angle, there was no guarantee ...

Philosophy Quest

The PQ Team

Dude TV (otherwise known as the Outdoor Living Network) runs a bunch of those reality shows pretending to be documentaries out to prove or disprove the existence of ghosts, sasquatches, giant squids, the Loch Ness Monster, and other mythical creatures. Each program sets the scene, gathers the team, sends them into the field armed with advanced technology and eyewitness accounts, and inevitably ends with nothing conclusive. While this confirms Carl Sagan’s observation that absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, it has spawned a plethora of running gags and inside jokes within my immediate circle. Ter and I are always fist pumping to the self-congratulatory “Good job, bro; on to the next one!” that ends every episode of Ghost Hunters—and on an occasional Thursday, my buddy known here as Boy Sister (or “BS”, ha ha) and I embark on a coffee time discussion of our own suppositions which we call Philosophy Quest.

We debate residual hauntings versus active hauntings, past lives, future lives, time travel, the time-space continuum, extraterrestrial life and how the pyramids were built, among other mysteries that seem inexplicable but have simply exceeded the capacity of Man’s puny mind. We exchange thoughts and theories, dumb jokes and belly laughs, and I often wonder what the folks around us overhear in passing. I don’t know many people who spend time hypothesizing about what would happen if we held hands and jumped into a black hole.

I really enjoy these talks, and I believe he does, too. He’s a pretty thoughtful guy for all his typical boy tendencies. As with OLN’s Ghost Hunters and Monster Quest, however, our investigations end inconclusively, hence our program byline:

“Philosophy Quest—all the questions and none of the answers.”

Showtime at Chapters Starbucks or the library courtyard wall, Thursdays at 2:00 p.m.