OK, Maybe This Time I Really Am Losing My Mind

I was sitting at the park the other day eating some tacos I had gotten at the drive-through, while Bernie walked around. I had a cup of Coke from the drive-through, and a can of Monster Energy that I had with me. As I drank the Coke, I poured the ME into the cup, slowly mixing the two together.

At one point, a friend of mine came by with her dogs, and I got up to talk to her. I chatted for a few minutes, then sat down and finished my food.

The cup of Coke and the can of ME had been next to each other while I ate. But when I finished the tacos, I noticed that the can of ME was gone. "Must have finished it and thrown it into the bag," I thought to myself, and I looked in the bag from the drive-through that I was now using for garbage. "Huh," I thought to myself, "that's weird." The can wasn't in the bag.

So I got up and looked in the nearby trash cans, in case I had gotten up, thrown the can in there, but just didn't remember having done so. But it wasn't in any of those.

I looked around on the ground, in case the wind had blown it down (even though it wasn't windy). But it was nowhere to be found.

I rechecked the bag and the ground around the table like five times, and did another pass at the nearby garbage cans. The can was nowhere to be found.

So what happened to the can? One minute it was there, the next, it was gone.

Sure, someone might have come by while I was talking to my friend. But there weren't a lot of people around. And I was half facing the table while I talked with her. So the odds of someone coming by at the exact moment I got up, walking by the table without my seeing them, and then (for whatever reason) grabbing my half-drank can of Monster Energy, are extremely slim.

So where did the can go? Did it just dematerialize?

Another friend came by with her dog, and I told her what happened, and she helped me look. But she couldn't find it either.

And, just to be sure I wasn't imagining that I had had the can in the first place, I tasted the Coke, making sure I could taste the Monster Energy in there.

So how does a can just disappear?

In my last post I joked about the possibility that I was losing my mind, because of some dreams I had had. But now I'm not so sure if that's really a joke....

Sure, it was just a can. And this whole thing sounds silly when you look at it from a perspective. But the idea of something being there one minute, and then being gone the next, with no plausible explanation for where it could have gone, is a little jarring to one's sense of reality.

Who knows, maybe I'll wake up from this in a few minutes and realize it was just a dream after all. :-)

Comments

Phillip said…
It's gnomes. Same reason the key swill NOT be on the table the 10 times you look, but will be there when you're yelling at someone that you already looked there ten times.
August 31, 2008 at 2:10 PM
Phillip said…
Or possibly you suffered from quantum waveform displacement (temporal static) http://memes.org/temporal-static
August 31, 2008 at 2:12 PM
Neil said…
Both excellent suggestions! Another would be a fourth-dimensional capricious being (I suppose a gnome could fit into that category).

Still another would be poor editing on the part of the movie maker. Consider movies where objects are in the scene one minute, and then gone the next. Well, perhaps there was a cut in the shooting of the movie, and they neglected to put the can back there when they resumed shooting the next day. I mean, it's possible.... ;-)
August 31, 2008 at 2:50 PM
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