Tour Guide to the Perils of the Multiverse

Beneath the cloak of the mundane and the routine, I have discovered a multiverse of incomprehensible multiplicity filled with the arcane and the obscure, inhabited by aberrant and anomalous phenomenon. What I have stumbled upon is no less than a bizarre underworld beneath our very noses lurking inside our own homes. Some will no doubt call me crazy, others will scoff, and a select enlightened few will grasp the significance of what I'm about to tell.

Read at your own risk. I fear you may never be the same. This is not for the squeamish; go and never return! Do your laundry, mow your grass, watch re-runs of Family Feud; go back to the comfort of your boring and mundane lives while you still can!

Not since the days when ships routinely sailed off the edge of a flat earth has something so ominous, so nefarious been revealed. In a time before recorded history, when ancient aliens visited our suspicious prehistoric progenitors, when knights fought off fire-breathing dragons indiscriminately ravaging entire villages, these tales all pale in comparison.

Malicious, foreboding, menacing...brace yourself!

Many bizarre discoveries have been discovered at great peril to the intrepid or the inadvertent...journey to the center of the earth, lost in space, becoming stranded in a parallel earth frequented by giant insects and voracious dinosaurs roaming vast unexplored jungles locked inside a hidden valley - in most cases I would be the guy that gets chased by the tyrannosaurus and eaten.

How can this be? The typical home contains a multiverse of the irrational and the inexplicable. Anomalies abound, such as hauntings, the lone missing sock, the empty sink mysteriously filled with dirty dishes, the un-ending laundry basket, the car keys that are never where you left them, children mysteriously teleporting in and out of your home...how else can you explain your children's behavior when they suddenly turn into - gasp - teenagers...need I go on?!!

I speak of a dark and sinister place, an alternate reality, a parallel universe that exists inside my own house...and perhaps yours as well.

Dread discoveries, inconspicuous phenomenon occur routinely around us . . .you may not be aware your attic might be occupied with goonies - did I just hear a thud in the attic followed by giggling??? Maybe aliens have burnt yet another crop circle in your unmown lawn . . .perhaps a grotesque wrinkled old troll lives under your footbridge...excuse me. Honey?!! I found your Aunt Ethylene - pause - under the bridge in the backyard on her walker. Sorry for the interruption. Now where was I? Oh yes! It all happened innocently enough, going about the mundane affairs of life when....wait! Is that Twilight Zone theme music I hear in the background???

Under the bed is a parallel universe...

It's a dark place, where 'dark matter' of the universe fills, a veritable black hole that sucks objects and small pets into its clutches, never to be seen again.

"My sandals are under there," she tells me.

And she expects me to reach my hand under the bed? Fear of being pulled under never to be seen crosses my mind or - gasp - draw back a nub of once what used to be my arm. Is that the theme music from Jaws I hear???

"Oh, sure," I say "let me be the sacrificial offering." Suddenly I feel so...expendable. not only can she survive without me, she would be much happier than she is...and I'm not sure I like the prospect of her being so happy after my terrible and gory demise.

"Wuss," she calls me.

Nope. I'm not falling for that one either. They always resort to tactics of coercion to overrule your common sense. That's how they prod the curious but reluctant kid to stick his head inside a crashed alien space ship, right before the aliens snatch him. Not me.

Suddenly I remember all those irrational fears of monsters lurking beneath my bed, the ones that came out at night, when the lights were turned off which is why for many years I refused to sleep without a night-light or my stuffed monkey to protect me. Finally my wife scolded me for being an overgrown ninny.

Whatever you do, don't look under the bed!

"Uh, uh," I say. I've seen this before in most intros into horror movies; they start off with innocent endeavors by unsuspecting persons in peril unknown to them while the rest of the movie audience screams & squirms in their seats, hoping to catch grody scenes of gory dismemberment between tightly clutched eyelids.

"Oh, sure! Something horrible happens to me and you collect the life insurance. You stick your arm under there."

Anybody got a broom handle?

Still don't take me seriously? You're talking to a budding astrophysicist here. I watched too many episodes of Star Trek to be unaware of the perils. Thanks to great scientific minds like Spock, Data,, and the grand guru of future knowledge, Gene Roddenberry. "What?!! You were thinking Carl Sagan? Isaac Asimov?!! How many episodes of Star trek did they write? See my point?"

Have you noticed that Kirk, Mc Coy, Spock...never get vaporized by the alien. It's always those unnamed security guys they beam down with them. They must have worn the shirts that said, "Disintegrate me, I'm the underling!" In every episode, when they beamed down a couple of security guys on some alien planet, I immediately knew some terrible thing would happen to them and they wouldn't be returning to the Enterprise. It was some immutable law of sci-fi plot writing.

I was not a wuss. I'm wary.

Once a crazy unsubstantiated theory that rapidly gained credibility after initially being rejected by disbelieving scientists; dark matter is now an accepted fact despite that it sounds like some 'corny' phrase invented from the fertile imagination of a 1920's sci-fi comic book writer.

Dark matter exists in the universe. We know this because it neither absorbs nor emits light and therefore is not detectable by normal scientific means available. The inescapable evidence is that there is no evidence to explain the discrepancy, when the relationship between the mass versus the rotational speeds from galaxies light years away is calculated. Theories make convenient bridges to gap the unknown with plausible speculation. If this makes absolutely no sense to you, it's because you aren't intelligent enough to believe in something you can't prove, therefore you can't be an astrophysicist.

Everybody knows that black holes suck light in, never to escape, which explains why my flashlight never works. Think about it. The batteries are always dead because the black hole sucks the light right out of it as soon as I turn it on. Battery manufacturers know this but don't tell you so you will keep buying their products.

And what about black holes? Rotating gravitational vortexes of indescribable density, compressed elements so heavy they implode upon themselves until all the normal empty space in atoms has been expelled, leaving incredibly dense matter with exponentially strong gravitational forces to suck you in...and you want me to stick my hand under there?

If the 83 per cent of the universe is filled with dark matter, you can't tell me there's not some of it lurking under my bed!

"There is nothing you can say that will make me do it."

"Fine." She threatens. "I'll go buy me a new pair at the..." I interrupt. "Grab me by my feet," I tell her. "I'm going in."

Shoe stores are another black hole of the universe, sucking all the money out of my wallet She goes just to look and returns with twelve more pair of shoes that don't fit. And every time women go there, something happens. The same person never comes back from those places; they exchange personalities with a myriad of denizens of feminine persona that inhabit those places. Think of it like an ectoplasmic bus stop, a busy terminal for incorporeal passengers in transit. It's an alien body snatching, murrain-seizing portal where roaming spirits randomly quantum leap from one estrogen inhabited corporeal habitat to another...which explains why you end up with a different wife every time she returns from shoe shopping. I've been married twenty-eight years to the same woman, whom I barely know. Her identity has quantum-leaped into so many alternate persona's, every time I think I know her, she changes.

So what is a woman's fascination with new shoes? Allow me to explain. Remember the cartoon where Elmer Fudd's personality changed whenever his hat changed? That's what happens when women change shoes. Don't laugh. Those Looney Tunes cartoons were a carefully encrypted encyclopedia of female psychology delivered to mankind by a sympathetic alien culture that visited us in eons past. Left to mankind to help us decode the enigma of the estrogen-impaired gender. Watch these episodes often, let its wisdom sink into your soul. As you observe how the other side of the gene pool think and behave, you too may become enlightened.

Don't call me a coward. Call me wary! The multiverse is no place for the squeamish or the naive.