Chapter 1: Intro
Once upon a time, there was younger, thinner, and drunker version of me. About seven years ago, to be precise. I had just celebrated my 28th birthday, I had been living in New York City for just under two years at the time, and I was convinced that my fame and fortune were right around the corner. They were not.
Autumn of 2012 was a fun time. In our house “God Forgive These Bastards” was constantly playing. For the rest of New York, however, the song of the times was by a young man named Rocky about how he loved bad bitches and how that was his fucking problem.
At this point, I was a simple man, who did simple things. My hobbies included drinking, smoking cigarettes, watching action movies, and listening to my friends have long coked up rants about random ass topics that they usually weren’t well-educated in.
We were at the point in our lives where we were coming off the self-righteous highs of our early twenties and our small communal living. We were sad to see the Occupy Wall Street movement start to die. We were all starting to contemplate what was going to happen next in our lives and trying to fully come to terms with what it meant to be an adult.
Anyways, I always loved sitting in on these conversations because people would just open up like crazy and spill out their most intimate dealings, insecurities, hopes, and fears and then the next morning completely forget about it. I also loved when they’d ramble on about something like, the magnetic pole shift, or some other nonsense that nobody really knew about. One conversation we had, however, always stuck with me. It’s stuck with me because I have experienced it and I have documented it and I believe it to be a lot more that how people chalk it up. It was a conversation about the “Mandela Effect.”
In case you’re not versed in this topic, dear reader, let me give a quick example. The namesake comes from an event that actually takes place a year after this book does: the death of Nelson Mandela. On December 5th, 2013, when he died, people from all over the globe flooded comment sections, internet forums, and various social media platforms declaring, “Nelson Mandela just died? I thought he died in prison in the early 1980s!” Another celebrity death people seem to misremember is David Soul, Hutch from Starsky and Hutch, committing suicide on Christmas at some point in the 70s, when anyone who saw the remake knows that’s just plain not true, because he has a cameo. Both of these would have happened before my time, so I can’t speak to them.
People will often chalk these events up to false memories and just conversation confusion or bad references. When you think of what Darth Vader says in Empire Strikes Back, your mind pictures him saying, “Luke, I am your father” somewhat eerily. In reality he says, “NO! I am your father!” quite angrily. You remember this wrong, dear reader, thanks to Chris Farley saying it wrong in Tommy Boy.
Similarly, in The Silence of the Lambs, Hannibal Lector never said, “Hello Clarice” and Forrest Gump said, “Life WAS like a box of chocolates.” We remember those lines wrong because they’ve been quoted wrong and we hear people’s quotes more than we watch the movies themselves.
I remember as a kid we would sing, “We will, we will rock you, sock you, pick you up and drop you.” even though those last two segments are not part of the song. I’m not sure why we sang it this way, but I’m guessing it was because some other kid on the playground started singing it that way and the rest of us slowly followed suit until we all thought that was how the song actually went.
I know that Mona Lisa smiles in her portrait, because it was the first thing that stuck out to me when I saw it for the first time, although many of you are probably imagining her with a nondescript emotionless stare. You’re remembering it that way, because it’s been parodied time after time, in cartoons and other pop culture, and people will often forget to include the smile.
I am usually a skeptic. At first this whole conversation seems goofy. “Isn’t it a lot more logical that you’re remembering things wrong?” But I can tell you that it’s not always this simple. Because the deeper I looked, the more of these little quirks I noticed. At some point, I couldn’t deny it anymore. Something big had happened in our reality and I don’t know if anyone is ready to talk about it.
Have you ever heard the song Iron Man? Of course you have, dear reader, everyone has. It’s a thrilling story about a man who travels into space, sees the future, sees the destruction of humankind, is turned to steel when he returns, and tries to warn everyone of their impending doom. As you can probably guess, nobody listens to him. Because of this: Iron Man, quite logically, decides that he should murder everyone; bringing about the same apocalypse he tried to avoid.
I suppose my story is quite a bit like that with a few exceptions. I never went to space, I didn’t see the future, I was never turned to steel, and I have no intention of murdering everyone. So I suppose my story is actually quite a bit different.
Either way. Here, dear reader, is my day to day account of the events as best as my memory serves me.
