Thirty-Five Years of Paranoid Flapdoodle

Only now, three days later, am I picking through the various omens and weirdness that popped up during what ended up being a very long birthday. Tops: I woke up at 6:30 a.m. to the house across the street blazing away, eventually to burn out completely and take part of the tree with it. The SFD eventually put it out, and no one was killed or seriously injured (though someone's Trivial Pursuit "Genus Edition" got pretty waterlogged). We decided to watch the fire on TV, maybe to have an insulating layer of objectivity between us and our early morning fears . . . anyway, every station covering it kept giving out our address, not our blazing neighbors’. Sure, they likely couldn’t read the proper address through the smoke, steam, water, flames—but it’s just bizarre that they decided to blatantly give out the wrong address instead. We laughed this off in the morning, but later in the day, alone and worn out, I started getting spooked by it. What sort of omen was it? Was there really no fire across the street? Was this all a grotesquely exteriorized metaphor, and if so for what? And how did that broken broom later blocking my path on the sidewalk fit in?

That night I got drunk, and all this fangy angst subsided properly for a time. But during the drunking, I experienced my first and stupidest episode of real precognition, and started anew the silly second-guessing. Dig: this curly-headed drunkard one booth over and I started talking, and suddenly I was hit with the inspiration: “He’s gonna start talking about the Kinks.” Sure enough, with no lead-in, no context, no warning, he began a ten minute friendly tirade about th’aforementioned Kinks (his oft-repeated point being that I should love The Kink Kontroversy as much as he, an impossible feat). At the risk of boring my only reader, then, I ask: what accounts for this? Does the alcoholic suppression of the forebrain allow messages from ten seconds from now to leak through? Does it help the telepathic broadcast of fanatic single-minded interests? Some combination? A big pissy delusion? And why, why so stupid a message?