Your latest surreal experience?

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

Today, in fact, about an hour ago, I fell down. I mean a real header out in the driveway. Tripped over an edging stone, stumbled about three steps, and down I went. Glasses flew, shoes flew, scraped a big patch of skin off my knee and my elbow, have a small abrasion on my forehead, and got a mouthful of dirt. Left hand is a bit scraped up, too.

Why is this surreal? Because I never fall down, and I mean never. I’ve always been gifted with extraordinary balance and coordination, and even at age 68 am still able to catch myself when I trip or stumble. It’s so uncommon for me to go down, that I cannot remember the last time it happened. My wife and I were trying to come up with an instance in the past 23 years and couldn’t think of one: snow, ice, mud, uneven sidewalks, hiking in the mountains: nary a bruised knee. Oh, I slip now and then. I trip. I lose footing. But never fall.

I remember that as I was falling, I was actually thinking “Holy shit, I’m falling!” and being hyper-aware that I was not going to be able to catch myself. Then I lay there looking at my glasses and my shoe and thinking “Now what?” I took inventory, flexed my guitar fretting hand to make sure nothing was broken and cautiously moved my leg to see if there was any sharp pain.

So now I sit here with a couple of bandages and antibacterial ointment on and grit my teeth against the stinging pain. Lesson learned: take the time to put on my outdoor shoes, instead of wearing these slip-ons, because I really don’t want to repeat the experience.

So what’s happened to youse guys lately?

2

Mostly they involve my elderly parents. Alice’s adventures are tame in comparison. However, the most recent bizarre event was my brother vanished for 48 hours last weekend. His wife was over here weeping and asking if SAR dogs can track cars? answer: NO. He showed up and everyone is completely ignoring what happened, whatever the heck it was. Sometimes I think I fell down the rabbit hole…

3

Yesterday I came home from work and found a fresh, uneaten red licorice stick on the step in front of the door. Whoever left it there had to go through a gate and around the corner of the garage to get to the place where it was left.

A warning of some kind?

4

I had a fairly productive day, sorting fairy wings and dragon parts and putting them away, then cleaning a bunch of lockpicks. Nothing surreal here.

(I’m pretty sure my surreal-o-meter, if I ever had one, has long since been out of calibration.)

5

This was a while back, but it was a really bizarre coincidence.

I was having some GI issues and my GI doc recommend I look into allergy shots. I do catering for drug reps which means when I need a specialty doctor I have a HUGE resource of people that I can call and say “I have this problem, who’s the best person I should see?”*. Well, I did that and the person I talked to said “See Dr Schmidt (not his real name), he specifically works with this issue”. After that, I chit chated with her for a few minutes and one of my employees gave me the high sign that the other line was for me and I told him to take a message.

Before I saw the message, I called to make an appointment with Dr Schmidt, what was strange/surreal is that instead of them answering “Dr Schmidt’s Office” they said “Hi, we’d like to place and order” and I said “What?” and she said “Isn’t this [store name]?” and I replied that it was and she said “Okay, we need [starting to place order]”. I stopped her and said that I was just trying to set up and appointment and then said “hold on, a few minutes ago I was on a phone call and someone called for me on the other line…was that you?”. Turns out it was.
Just an extremely strange coincidence that I called to make an appointment at, literally, the exact same time that they were calling to place an order with my store (for the first time). After a few minutes of confusion on both our ends, I booked an appointment and she set up a lunch order.

Worked out well, years later, I’m still a patient** (and I love the doctor) and they still order lunches all the time…and we still talk about that phone call.

*I have several hundred drug reps at my disposal all that deal with certain issues, it’s a nice resource. Even if they’re somewhat biased, sometimes it’s better than just picking someone out of the phonebook.

**And for those of you that don’t get allergy shots. Getting them means going into the office a lot. I know nearly the entire staff by name. Hell, I even see a lot of the same patients. It’s not that I stop in once or twice a year, I was in there 1-2 times a week for the first 6 months and now I go every month.

PS, if anyone in Milwaukee needs a great Allergy/Sinus/Asthma doctor, let me know, this guy is awesome.

6

El_Kabong: I’ve heard of the Black Hand, but this is a new twist (Ha! Get it? ‘Twist’?)

As the evening is progressing, I’m discovering new and interesting pain, including my right shoulder, ankle and wrist, and all of the knuckles on my left hand. Tomorrow morning should be entertaining. I took a couple of Aleve right away, but am pretty sure the pain gods are laughing at such puny measures.

7

Well, I’m not as crippled this morning as I thought I might be. Stiffness on the right side, which is to be expected, and some tender bruises. I keep replaying that whole thing in my head like some sort of low level PTSD event. Weird.

8

I had to look u p “surreal” in the dictionary to try to sift out what would match.

OK, then, just yesterday, I was watching the Astros game on TV. Jose
Altuve hit a triple, but the third base coach signaled him to come in standing up, and he was tagged out. In the major leagues! That certanly met the test of “having the disorienting, hallucinatory quality of a dream; unreal; fantastic”.

9

A crow might have dropped it. I’m pretty sure they have left us a couple of doodads on our deck. They are so smart, they might have actually thought you would like to have it!

10

More likely some type of small animal was carrying it and got startled and dropped it while passing in front of your stoop. WAG

11

We were heading to the movies last weekend, driving down the major highway for the area, when we noted a 1976 Beetle up ahead in the right lane. As we slowly caught up to it, we were commenting on the size of the Beetle compared to the compact car in the next lane. When we were finally alongside, I glanced over to check out the driver and saw Spider-Man sitting in the passenger seat. Seriously, it was a full-sized adult in a complete-with-mask Spider-Man costume.

I got a spectacular photo of it to post on Facebook that evening, because how often do you come across Spider-Man riding shotgun in a 1976 Beetle? :smiley:

12

Probably not as often as Batman.

13

Being threatened by a masked man wielding a machete was quite surreal.

14

About a week ago I tripped and fell while walking into a liquor store. I’m sure that raised some eyebrows.

15

I can remember one as vividly as if it were yesterday, but it was in 1962. I was driving up the Big Sur highway in California, which has enough blind curves in it that the car ahead of you often disappears from view. I was following a white MGB. The MGB went around a cliff and disappeared, and a second or two later, an identical white MGB came out from behind the cliff coming in my direction. My first thought was “How did he turn around so fast at highway speed?” I had an initial impression that the car had hit something and “bounced” back, like a ball thrown against a well that is not in view. I guess that would work for “surreal”.

16

Last week, as I was driving to work, I saw three people fully dressed in Bear costumes running down the sidewalk. Not walking, running, and at a good clip, too.

Probably actors appearing at some event who were late, or whose car had broken down, but still, it was just so damn odd.

17

Over a 48 hour period I met three different, unrelated people named Mark.

Yesterday (24 hours after meeting the third Mark) I received three text messages, each from a “Mark” (one text from each “Mark”). My replies made no sense to the recipients, as I was confused who each sender “Mark” was.

It took a long while to straighten out the mess I’d created.

18

In all my working years, I never worked with anyone who had the same first name as I, spelled the same way. Then I got hired on with a small company and there were three of us. It just seemed weird.

19

I bought several donuts at the store, one of which was a traditional round with maple icing. When I got home, all donuts were accounted for except one, but I did find a doughy lump in the bottom of the bag.

Thinking that this must be my prized maple round, I tried my best to do a donut autopsy and unfold and reshape it to original form. When done, however, the frosting was now butterscotch, it was a topographical impossibility that it could ever have been round with a hole. It could only have been bar shaped. There was also chocolate cream residue–none of my donuts had chocolate cream.

I can only conclude that the cashier, while I was focused on the payment terminal, stole my maple round and replaced it with a damaged substitute donut, thinking I’d chalk it off to a common squashed-in-the-bag incident when I returned home.

20

Maybe it was put in the bag by whatever small animal left me that licorice stick.