The music, videos, and polemic of John Ludi, random scourge.
Wednesday, September 27, 2017
Tuesday, September 26, 2017
My Own Personal "Mandela Effect".
A meme that seems to have taken the paranormal world by storm over the past few years is an intriguing
phenomenon called “The Mandela Effect”. It is so named for
Nelson Mandela and the fact that a substantially large amount of the
population seems to remember this beloved elder statesman dying as
much as two decades before he actually did. The subject matter of
this phenomenon is too broad and extensive for me to do more than
give it a cursory description here, so I strongly suggest you do a
search for it...and keep your mind open as you do. A fair amount of
search results will be of the standard issue debunking type, but a
few will take you down some interesting paths. These mass
“mis-rememberings” range from things as trivial as the spellings
of cereal brands and the titles of children's books to the location
of the heart inside the human body (which many of you probably
remember being slightly under the left lung...as I do...well it no
longer is...and it “never” was...it's in the center of our bodies
now...where it always wasn't).
The implications of this phenomenon are something I've played with since I was a young child, as I was beset by what I came to call “reality shifts” from a really early age...and my observations of them and the tentative conclusions reached paralleled nicely with the increasing notion that physical reality itself may not be the firm and fixed thing that our culture assumes it is, but a far more fluid substance...if it actually “exists” in the way we think of as “existing” at all. It may just be a construct or a projection. (That's how I see it myself: a large learning tool...a playground/schoolroom/thrill ride for consciousness.)
When I was in 1st grade I had an initial taste of the Mandela Effect well before I was equipped to emotionally deal with it.
I was a daydreamer...especially when in an environment that did not challenge my intellect, which would be an excellent description of the public school system then and now. Like a lot of scruffy little manlings, I had two or three outfits that I wore constantly, and that was about it. One of these outfits incorporated an olive-colored sweater vest that buttoned in the front with a series of brown mottled buttons, each of which had their own distinct pattern and four holes for thread.
Being bored beyond belief by the curriculum, I had pretty much memorized the patterns in these buttons as I would play with them constantly, taking my thumbnail and trying to ram a corner of it into each of the holes in the button peering up at me from it's position over my belly. I would say that I knew these buttons like the back of my hands, but I knew them much more: the back of my hands were not all that interesting to me at that juncture...but the buttons were my late 60's fidget spinner.
One day while readying myself for a REALLY intense burst of random daydreaming, I looked down and the four-holed buttons now only had two holes. I was extremely startled by this. I looked at each button and verified that the patterns in the mottling of the buttons were the same. I realized that there was NO chance that my mother would have been able to find buttons with the EXACT same random color pattern and sew them on this vest while I wasn't looking, so I did what a lot of young children do when confronted with something totally contrary to everything they understand:
I completely freaked out.
My freak out was so extreme that the principal (an avuncular grandfatherish figure named Mr. Albert) decided to drive me home. Wanting to figure out what I was ranting about, the principal informed me that his car was only capable of making left turns, which allowed him to take a long and circuitous route while asking a barrage of questions.
The implications of this phenomenon are something I've played with since I was a young child, as I was beset by what I came to call “reality shifts” from a really early age...and my observations of them and the tentative conclusions reached paralleled nicely with the increasing notion that physical reality itself may not be the firm and fixed thing that our culture assumes it is, but a far more fluid substance...if it actually “exists” in the way we think of as “existing” at all. It may just be a construct or a projection. (That's how I see it myself: a large learning tool...a playground/schoolroom/thrill ride for consciousness.)
When I was in 1st grade I had an initial taste of the Mandela Effect well before I was equipped to emotionally deal with it.
I was a daydreamer...especially when in an environment that did not challenge my intellect, which would be an excellent description of the public school system then and now. Like a lot of scruffy little manlings, I had two or three outfits that I wore constantly, and that was about it. One of these outfits incorporated an olive-colored sweater vest that buttoned in the front with a series of brown mottled buttons, each of which had their own distinct pattern and four holes for thread.
Being bored beyond belief by the curriculum, I had pretty much memorized the patterns in these buttons as I would play with them constantly, taking my thumbnail and trying to ram a corner of it into each of the holes in the button peering up at me from it's position over my belly. I would say that I knew these buttons like the back of my hands, but I knew them much more: the back of my hands were not all that interesting to me at that juncture...but the buttons were my late 60's fidget spinner.
One day while readying myself for a REALLY intense burst of random daydreaming, I looked down and the four-holed buttons now only had two holes. I was extremely startled by this. I looked at each button and verified that the patterns in the mottling of the buttons were the same. I realized that there was NO chance that my mother would have been able to find buttons with the EXACT same random color pattern and sew them on this vest while I wasn't looking, so I did what a lot of young children do when confronted with something totally contrary to everything they understand:
I completely freaked out.
My freak out was so extreme that the principal (an avuncular grandfatherish figure named Mr. Albert) decided to drive me home. Wanting to figure out what I was ranting about, the principal informed me that his car was only capable of making left turns, which allowed him to take a long and circuitous route while asking a barrage of questions.
I'm not sure what he was able to
conclude (if anything)...memory fades of these years...but my
conclusion was that the reality that I thought was a fixed and solid
thing, wasn't. Thus, at a VERY young age I started questioning the
fundamental basis of physical reality itself. Once I got a few more
years and words under me, I called this a “reality shift”. It
was the first of several, but probably the most impacting...it
changed the course of my life. Later as I discovered science
fiction, Eastern Philosophy, hallucinogens and quantum physics, these
incidents made more sense within my expanding worldview. Now when
things happen of this nature I don't even bat an eye, as I don't
think much of this stuff around us it “real” in the way most
people seem to define it.
By my teens I was fairly blasé about my “reality shifts”. For about six years I worked at a hotel in various capacities. The hotel was right next to the apartment complex where my small family lived. For a while I worked an early morning shift and would walk the same path through the same courtyard every morning. At one point after a summer weekend I saw that some reveler had smashed a bottle of blackberry brandy into the ground. It was the same coffee syrup-like swill that I would drink to clear my throat before a gig with my then band, Soft War, so I knew it well. The bottle had a dark purplish label...for about two weeks, at which point it decided that it would be much happier as a broken GINGER brandy bottle.
When I first noticed this, I inspected the area to see if there were any more bottles of this Elixir of the Gods laying about. Nope. This was the lone one...and the pattern of breakage was exactly the same. It would have been practically impossible to fake such a thing without making molds and spending a fair bit of money in a very narrow time window, just to startle some young poor teen whose destiny was to fade into middle-aged obscurity in a glorified tent in a tedious cultural backwater, having accomplished very little of public importance. The bottle remained lodged in the lawn until things warmed up and some groundskeeper decided that it posed a threat to his lawnmower. For my part, I pondered it with wry amusement, always asking myself if it had not always been a ginger brandy bottle and I was just simply mistaken. The brain does things like that.
It's hard to say either way. I always had mixed feelings about the topic until the Mandela Effect started poking it's head into the mainstream culture. Now I have a lot more validation for these experiences, which is comforting in a small way...my brain may be in better shape than I thought it was...but in a MUCH larger way it's pretty disconcerting...as all of physical reality may not be.
Food for thought, basically. If it's just John Ludi misremembering various trivial things, it's one thing...but if MILLIONS of people misremember the VERY SAME THINGS in THE VERY SAME WAYS, it points to something a LOT larger.
Which, of course, points to the question at the heart of almost everything: Why?
And I definitely have no room on here for THAT. Or a clue.
By my teens I was fairly blasé about my “reality shifts”. For about six years I worked at a hotel in various capacities. The hotel was right next to the apartment complex where my small family lived. For a while I worked an early morning shift and would walk the same path through the same courtyard every morning. At one point after a summer weekend I saw that some reveler had smashed a bottle of blackberry brandy into the ground. It was the same coffee syrup-like swill that I would drink to clear my throat before a gig with my then band, Soft War, so I knew it well. The bottle had a dark purplish label...for about two weeks, at which point it decided that it would be much happier as a broken GINGER brandy bottle.
When I first noticed this, I inspected the area to see if there were any more bottles of this Elixir of the Gods laying about. Nope. This was the lone one...and the pattern of breakage was exactly the same. It would have been practically impossible to fake such a thing without making molds and spending a fair bit of money in a very narrow time window, just to startle some young poor teen whose destiny was to fade into middle-aged obscurity in a glorified tent in a tedious cultural backwater, having accomplished very little of public importance. The bottle remained lodged in the lawn until things warmed up and some groundskeeper decided that it posed a threat to his lawnmower. For my part, I pondered it with wry amusement, always asking myself if it had not always been a ginger brandy bottle and I was just simply mistaken. The brain does things like that.
It's hard to say either way. I always had mixed feelings about the topic until the Mandela Effect started poking it's head into the mainstream culture. Now I have a lot more validation for these experiences, which is comforting in a small way...my brain may be in better shape than I thought it was...but in a MUCH larger way it's pretty disconcerting...as all of physical reality may not be.
Food for thought, basically. If it's just John Ludi misremembering various trivial things, it's one thing...but if MILLIONS of people misremember the VERY SAME THINGS in THE VERY SAME WAYS, it points to something a LOT larger.
Which, of course, points to the question at the heart of almost everything: Why?
And I definitely have no room on here for THAT. Or a clue.