The unbearable bizarreness of everyday life
Returning home late at night recently, when I cross the bridge I always come upon some sort of near-hallucinatory vision. The other day, it was a car with blue headlights. Just a personal improvement someone had installed, surely: but coming out at me from the dull yellow haze of the other car lights, in the rain and the fog and the wet gleaming blackness, for a second it seemed like maybe it was a ghost car, not really there at all. Maybe only I could see it, and it was heading straight at me.
Yesterday, it was another biker ahead of me on the bridge: but I couldn’t tell if he were coming towards me or away from me. I saw a silhouette, a wheel, but it seemed to be neither retreating nor coming closer, and I couldn’t make out the handlebars to better triangulate the direction. Then the biker turned sideways and headed out into the empty road, and I saw it was not a biker at all, but a person on a unicycle.
A person on a unicycle just out for a ride at 3 am in the night.
Before I could blink again, he was off a side street and gone.
Yesterday, it was another biker ahead of me on the bridge: but I couldn’t tell if he were coming towards me or away from me. I saw a silhouette, a wheel, but it seemed to be neither retreating nor coming closer, and I couldn’t make out the handlebars to better triangulate the direction. Then the biker turned sideways and headed out into the empty road, and I saw it was not a biker at all, but a person on a unicycle.
A person on a unicycle just out for a ride at 3 am in the night.
Before I could blink again, he was off a side street and gone.