My friend and I were talking about the weirder shit in life last night and she reminded me of...well...a piece of weird shit back when I was 18.  At the time, I lived in a two-bedroom townhouse with anywhere from 5 to 9 other people at any given point.  My then-boyfriend and I slept in the basement (which sucked candy-coated donkey balls. Nobody should wake up to golf-ball-sized spider bites) and one night, after...uh...hanging out...I wrote a word on my fingers.  I don't remember why I did it, and I don't remember what the word was, but there were five letters, one letter for each finger.  He and I then went upstairs where our friend met us in the kitchen, and out of the stinkin' blue, she asks, "I wonder how you spell (insert that word)?"  I raised my hand and the look of shock on her face was freakin' priceless. 

Then we drank beer and smoked a bong.

Dammit, I'm going to look retarded, and I don't care.  It's six in the morning, I haven't slept yet, and I'm pretty sure my friend spiked my booze with more booze to trick me into calling off work (which worked).

I very much enjoy this thread and I have ever since I knew of its existence.  So I was rather sure that I knew all the stuff that's been posted here.  But I just flipped back through a few pages, and I swear to the Clown God of Clowning Clowns that there's posts that I haven't read before, nestled right in between familiar posts.  Like johnqzoidberg's magazine attack, and etank1111's Lucille Ball story (which I swear I thought she was still alive).

There's a few others, but I'm curious to see if anyone else has noticed the same thing.  Or if I'm just completely off my drunken rocker.

Which is muy possible. Energy drinks plus booze is a helluva mixer.   

I know for a fact that I posted a second response in this thread that sat between Dawn and Mythicfox's posts.

I remember typing it, I remember reading it after it was posted...

The biggest example used by Wong was that of new words suddenly popping up, yet they've been there for ages. I don't remember coming across the word "irreverent" until recently, yet there it is, in the bible and everything (book of Hebrews).

On the Phillip K Dick thing, what's going on with that missing android thing? It's a bit Lovecraft with the whole HE'S STILL OUT THERE! element.

True story. Last night, I was in the middle of reading the JDATE sequel for the first time, and got up to use the bathroom. As I'm walking in, I see a cockroach (a tiny one, not one of those thumb-sized monsters you probably think of when you hear the word) crawling around on the shower wall. We've had a few roaches in this apartment ever since we moved in, but we almost always just see them around the kitchen sink. Anyway, I'm about to turn on the water and send this guy into the plumbing system, when I notice that the drain has few hairs on it which might keep the roach from going through. I grab a wad of toilet paper, pick them out, and throw it in the trash, all of which takes about two seconds. Then I look back at the roach... and he's gone. Vanished without a trace. I look all over, any place he could have gotten to in those two seconds, and there's just nothing there.

I don't know what happened. Maybe it was a freak hallucination. Maybe I blacked out for a minute. Maybe he crawled into a tiny wormhole, got sent back in time, and now the Nazis lost World War 2. Maybe he was saved by another roach sent through a tiny wormhole from the future. Maybe he somehow jumped onto me and burrowed into my brain, and it's him writing this post right now. Maybe the Rapture happened, and that roach was the only truly good Christian on Earth. Whatever the case, what's most important is that it's a really terrible story. Anyone who heard it would just assume that I imagined the whole thing or wasn't looking in the right spot, and wonder why I had wasted thirty seconds of their day. I'll probably never tell that story again (you lucky dogs!). Realizing that, and rereading the other stories in this thread, got me thinking about magic.

No, the lame kind.

Without going into the details, I'll just say that there are magicians in my family. It wasn't something I was very drawn to myself, but growing up I saw a whole lot more magic tricks performed and explained than your average person. What I realized a long time ago is that the very best tricks, for a jaded skeptic like me at least, are the ones that don't completely violate your sense of reality. The guy picking your card back out of the deck is more impressive than the lady getting sawed in half, because when you watch the latter you know on every level of your being that a lady is not getting sawed in half right now, and your brain immediately starts trying to work out the gimmick. On the other hand, if a guy can maybe read the card you're thinking of by your body language, or perfectly follow the way you shuffle it back into the deck, or just get really really really lucky, well that's improbable and amazing, but it doesn't require a break from the basic physical laws that we all know and love.

That's how the shadow people work. Maybe they were worse at it 2000 years ago, and impossible, lady-sawed-in-half miracles were happening all the time, but by now they've refined their art of warping reality right to that breaking point, but not past it. A vanishing cockroach? Richard Pryor dying twice? A shadowy figure that you glimpse for a moment exactly once in your entire life? Those things aren't going to get anyone a press conference, or send anyone to the loony bin (not yet, anyway). Somebody has simply figured out the precise level of spookiness that our rational minds will tolerate, so that we fall for their card trick every single time.

Happy Halloween.

Happens to me all the time.  I swear, whenever I come up with anything that could be called "original", the concept is introduced to the world immediately afterward as something that has already been someone else's idea.  Like the idea of a movie about a comedian running for president that I came up with the day before the first commercial for "Man of the Year" was shown, along with at least seven other instances I can name off the top of my head and countlss that I can't.

Anywho, here's one I heard from someone on the internet, so I can't verify whether it's honest or not:

"My family's a bunch of pack mules, so we keep pretty much anything we've ever owned in our basement.  I went down there one day looking for a gaming system my mom had recently packed away, assuming I didn't use it any more.  While I was down there, I found the parts to my old bunk bed inside a box.  I remembered how I always hated sleeping on the bottom, because I was afraid the top would come down and crush me if either one of us moved around too much.  I was so relieved when I finally got the room to myself, and we took the bunk bed apart to make room for a normal, single-person bed.  I slept better in that new bed than I ever had before.  Unfortunately, I don't think I'll ever sleep well again after finding that old bunk bed...  Because I'm an only child."

So today I was at work and got a call from an unfamiliar number. I let it go to my voice mail because, you know, work. When I listened to it, it's this guy from some debt management company I'd never heard of. He wanted me to know that they wanted to help me ease my debt - he had my records and saw I was only paying the minimum payments on it, for instance. Now, I know you're saying, "Molecule, what's so creepy about a dude who's with a company that clearly has your best interests (Hah! Pun!) in mind offering you his services?" First off, I want to make sure you know the only services he offered were financial. Second - and don't continue if you don't want your mind to be blown -


I don't own a single credit card. Never have.

Clearly, the documents he had were some relic the Shadow People missed when they erased me ever having a credit card. I started wondering why I'd had that card, and ran up so much debt. Maybe they erased the woman who was to be my wife, and the debt was supposed to be from paying for the wedding. In that case, I wasn't too mad, I mean, if I was married I wouldn't be boning all these supermodels, would I? But then I thought, what if I ran up that debt paying for school as I got my Phd in Sexology? I could be boning even more supermodels, if you can imagine.

Then I realized the most likely scenario: I'd met my wife while getting my Sexology Phd and she was a supermodel who would bring her friends home from work! Now, as you can imagine, I'm plenty mad at the Shadow Men for taking that away from me, and if John and Dave ever need my help to fight them, like if John has to take a sick day and they need someone to bone hot women, I'll totally be there.