You’ve been our closest, dearest friends for as long as we can remember. Some of the happiest times of our lives have been spent in your company and I think I speak for Bob as well when I say that just about every happy memory of our adult lives has been shared with you.

We love you as we love our own flesh and blood family, and if it came right down to it, you might be the only people we would pull into a life raft ahead of our own offspring.  You’ve always been there in our time of need. When I needed a kidney, you, Helen, gave me one of yours (thank you so much, it’s working perfectly!). When Bob lost all of our money in the Madoff scheme, the two of you paid our mortgage until we got back on our feet.

I think you know how we feel about you, but in case you didn’t, Bob and I wanted to make sure to put it down on paper.

As you know, each year we drop one of our couple friends – a tradition that goes back well over thirty years now. It all started with the Kruzkowiczes, that annoyingly cloying couple, and it just seemed like such a good idea at the time that we “cull the crop” every year. Out with the old and in with the new! It keeps things fresh.

Well, due to the thinning of our corps of friends through our lovely tradition and the usual kinds of attrition, this leaves us with just you as friends. And over the last year, we’ve really come to rely on you since we really have no one else, and you’re so good-natured and generous with redundant organs, we hoped to never come to this point.

But, the Jenkinses were killed in that horrific crash on the cross county, and the Dows retired to Alaska, and – of all the gall – the Dewbys dropped us. Us! Can you believe the horrible things she said at the Polar Opposites Convention? So I’m afraid that leaves just you. I wish it didn’t have to be this way, but tradition is tradition.

To get things rolling we’re rescinding our Thanksgiving invitation and, of course, we won’t be taking the cruise together. Please have Apollo return Bob’s chain saw and I think it only fair that you leave the knitting circle, Helen, since I’m the founder. That leaves just me, so I guess the circle comes to an end as well. I hope it’s OK that I keep using the kidney, but I understand if you want it back. If things were reversed, I might do the same.

All the best,

Bob and Donna

The car wheezed along and I found my way to a town with a service station. The mechanic looked at my car and said, “You want to see Old Bill; he’s the only guy round here who fixes VWs. Just go straight out that road a few miles. Turn right first road after you see the big rock.”

I got there and the clutch cable snapped along the way- no big deal, I could fix that. The clouds were starting to break up and it was getting hot again and the blue sky turned the storm clouds a shining silvery gray. I rang the bell and banged on the door a few minutes, then I went back to the car and pulled down the roof and sat and read the workshop  manual knowing it would make the car fix itself. After a while, I heard a door creak open and looked to see the man transluscent behind the screen.

“I can’t go anywhere. There’s a vacuum problem and the clutch cable just snapped.”

The door slammed shut and a minute later the garage door opened from the inside and he said, “wheel it on in here.”

I did. He looked like I might expect, old, sunburnt, scraggly hair, no t-shirt under overalls. No baseball cap. He looked under the hood.

“You want me to start it?”

“Without a clutch cable…nah. I heard it from the road. Take a couple hours. Need two manifold boots and a clutch cable. Got to go to Newton’s for those. You can sit over by that table and wait. It’s shady.”

“Thanks. How much you think this is gonna cost.”

“Twenty, thirty bucks.” I looked down and mentally counted down my remaining money. I could do it if I slept on the ground a few nights.

“We’ll see. You might maybe be able to work it off.”

Old Bill – who didn’t look all that old – climbed into a pristine but roofless microbus and started it. VW motors don’t roar, but they do sing when they’re feeling up to it and this one was in perfect voice, the rhythmic tap-tap-tap of vavles perfectly gapped opening and closing in perfect Volkswagen time. He sat there, engine idling, his head tilted slightly and an arm suspended in front of him like a conductor’s. Then he drove off leaving a cloud of desert dust.

1. Sidewalk gum splotches. Intentional? Accidental? Perhaps the art of gum containment has been lost over the decades. Or maybe new gum technologies make it inevitable that gum leap forth from the maw of the chewer. Maybe we don’t care about such things any more and the end is nigh. Perhaps it’s a conspiracy to keep sidewalk gum removal specialists and chemical manufacturers in business. Perhaps gum tagging a sidewalk is a new rite of passage. Whatever the reason, it bugs me.
   
2. The entirety of humanity.

The argument started in the box – Bob was part of a flipchart 3-pack and he shared space with his two siblings, Miriam and Filbert. Miriam was saying – and he really had no memories of anything before – that life began when flipcharts were bound. Flibert argued that life surely began before that, when the pages that were so integral to flipcharts were first made and cut to size. No memories of anything before the argument…that bothered Bob, but he didn’t as yet know why.

“You’re both wrong,” he said. “Life begins long before we take shape, when we’re just a bunch of wood pulp floating in a vat.”

“If that’s the case,” said Filbert. “Then what about pre wood pulp? Surely there was life.”

“You could make the argument,” said Miriam in her firm voice that Bob realized he found condescending. “That our lives began the moment the tree that became our life-pulp was cut down.”

They all murmured their assent. Personally, Bob didn’t want to think about how the life of a flipchart was dependent on the death of a tree.

Many mystics asserted that flipchart and tree were one, even if only one was conscious at a time. They were all connected in a glorious circle of life. Blah, blah, blah.

“Circle shmircle,” said Filbert. We do not die and become trees. It’s linear. Trees live, then willingly give their lives so that they may become flipcharts.”

“In a way, we’re their afterlife,” Miriam said.

“Which makes this… what, heaven?” said Filbert. Bob was not at all convinced that this wasn’t just a load of hooey to pass the time.

It went on like that for awhile and soon Bob dozed to the soothing sound of his brother’s and sister’s voices.

Eventually, Bob ended up on an easel in a windowless room near an easel with Miriam. Together they looked out on an oval conference table and a whiteboard. Neither of them knew what became of Filbert. Some days the room was bright and filled with people who wrote or drew things on their pages. Bob felt satisfaction in fulfilling his destiny. Most of the time, his pages would be flipped back, revealing a new page. But every so often a page would be torn and taped to a wall, or crumpled and thrown away. It didn’t hurt, but he remembered less with each lost page until he was unaware of anything at all.

–It’s been suggested from time to time that there are multiple universes, and recently that there are infinite universes parallel to the glorious one we occupy. I heard an interview with Brian Greene, the primary posit-er of the multiverse theory, and shortly thereafter I thought about what would happen if all of the alternate versions of me in these alternate realities had found a way of getting in touch with one another… This mess, abandoned after just a few paragraphs, is what resulted. — DS

As someone said and another parodied, “in this, the best of all possible worlds.”

I’ve numbered them, the alternate me(s) that populate the uncountable universes.  My role model me by far is AR371, with AR standing for alternate reality. It sounds much better to my ear than AM (alternate me), so until something better comes along, that’s the system I’m going with. Any questions?

He’s not necessarily the brightest or richest, but he’s accomplished what I’d have wished to accomplish for myself at this age. More about that me later. The honor of most compelling goes to AR2162, an adventurer who has been accompanied his entire life by a fist-sized invisible water-spitting dragon hovering just above his left shoulder recording the events of his life. 2162 only discovered this by inhaling the vapors of a vial of dark yellow fluid the creature placed where normally goes a beer. One whiff and 2162 watched from an odd camera angle a disturbing event starring himself at the summit of Devil’s Tower some 30 years ago.

But first, a little about the numbering system. Chronological based on the order in which I discovered these selves, or they discovered me. We all experienced a shock, a jolt, a trauma of some sort that stimulated a part of our brain that now acts as a bit of connective tissue across the many realities. Difficult to explain. It’s possible, ne likely, that we’re all insane or brain-damaged and all of these selves and worlds exist solely in the mind of one of us. But which one? No matter.

-JFK