Chopping cotton in The Garden of Forking Paths

 There's something called "the Mandela Effect". In short, it's the idea that there's something wonky about reality because people's memories are faulty. Some popular examples are the idea that the universe flip-flops between "Froot Loops" and "Fruit Loops," than the comedian Sinbad played a genie in a movie called Shazaam, and the concept's namesake, the idea that Nelson Mandela died sometime in the '80s while in prison.

 Now. I want to go on record here and say I think the Mandela Effect has less to do with the rubbery nature of reality and more to do with the idea that people's memories are faulty. Similar to how people's perceptions are questionable, even at the best, makes me question concepts like ghosts, physic phenomenons, and so forth. I've done peyote and read Kant. Everything you see is a couple thousandth of a second late, and that's just how it is.

 Your senses don't tell you the Truth, they tell you what humans have evolved to understand so they can make it through reality. We've yet to catch up with moving faster than roughly 30 miles an hour, evolutionarily speaking, so when you're driving down the road, your brain can't process everything so it just "fills in empty spaces". Isn't that a fun thought?

 Anyhow, I said all that to say all this. In the last 48 hours, I've discovered the music of a guy named Roger Tillison. He was a singer-songwriter from Tulsa who came up during the '60s and '70s. He was friends with that whole Tulsa crew, like Leon Russell and Jesse Ed Davis, and spent time in Woodstock when Bob Dylan, The Band, and Bobby Charles were doing their thing. He filled in for Eric Clapton when the latter was too strung out on heroin to play for George Harrison's Concert for Bangladesh.

 He put out a record on Atlantic's Atco subsidiary in 1971 called Roger Tillison's Album. He does a Dylan song ("Down In The Flood"), a Band number ("Get Up Jake"), and a Woody Guthrie deep cut ("The Old Cracked Looking Glass") among other covers and originals. I'd heard the Dylan and Band song, on the same album, actually, but I'd never heard the Guthrie song. It's pretty good. Guy's a solid singer and there's some neat raw, rockin' country-influenced playing, the sort of stuff I really dig. Imagine a grittier Flying Burrito Brothers.

 He didn't put out another record until 2003, Mamble Jamble, and that was initially released only in Japan. He spent most of his time playing in and around Tulsa, occasionally recording with old friends and picking up the odd gig touring. He died in 2013 at 72, and apparently really enjoyed his life the whole time. Good for him, far too many of us don't get to do that.

 Every now and then, I come across a musician or an author I should know about. It happened with Swamp Dogg. Didn't know him from Adam's housecat, regardless of my love for Southern soul, and now I'm a fanatic. Country singer Little David Wilkins cut an album back in the '70s with a classic honky tonker "Who Ever Turned You On, Forgot To Turn You Off". I mean, that just screams Urban Cowboy.

 All that Harper's Letter trying to save well-off op-ed writers from being criticized? There's some dude, name escaped me, but he's such incredibly insufferable bourgeoisie douchebag - like David Brooks and Andrew Sullivan double-teamed Maureen Dowd - that I have no idea how I managed to keep him off my radar for so long. The older I get, the more this happens, and it never fails to blow my mind.

 There's an explanation of the weirdness of quantum mechanics called the Many-Worlds Interpretation. Essentially, since we can't tell a subatomic particle's attributes until it's observed, the who subatomic realm is really weird compared to how the macro-world works. One interpretation, the Copenhagen, is the most popular and says everything is just mathematically a probability until it's observed, wherein it collapses into reality. It's just math, though, the best we can observe because we physically don't have the tools to be more precise.

 The MWI is similar, except that every conservative splits off a different reality. It goes back to Schrodinger's Cat; once the box is open, two universes form. One where the cat is alive and one where it's dead. Again, it's just the math they do to make the science works. Quantum mechanics is an actual thing and one of the best theories in science. It's just weird as shit and makes no sense because the reality we can see and touch doesn't act this way.

 The thing about quantum mechanics is that it's so weird and so hard to wrap your head around, a lot of folks just go nuts with it. From the Tao of Physics to What The Bleep Do We Know, quantum woo has been a lucrative stroke for a lot of folks. In the same neighborhood is the idea that reality and consciousness are tied into the quantum level. There's some legit science going on working on the idea that there's something tying them together.

 I'm not going to pretend that I understand it, because I don't, but the general gist is since the brain uses electrical impulses, it ties into the quantum world. Since it affects that and that affects the macro world, consciousness can affect reality. Now, modern neurobiology doesn't really swing with this and considers whatever computational aspect there is in the quantum world, it doesn't have anything to do with how the brain works or how reality is.

 Still, it's an interesting stroke. One of the more far-out theories - and I think it has something to do with Robert Anton Wilson's "reality tunnels" but I can't recall - is that reality isn't so much defined by consciousness, but consciousness experiences different reality. It's somehow connected to the MWI, but the little splits in the universe are very localized. It also ties into Douglas Adams' who stroke with Probability and the Whole Sort Of General Mish-Mash.

 So maybe I drift through a constantly changing universe, where things pop into and out of existence. I thought for the longest time that country singer Terri Gibbs was so freaked out by her song "Somebody's Knockin'," which talks about being seduced by "the Devil," that she went back to singing purely gospel music. I also thought for the longest time that Michael Martin Murphy used to be part of a family gospel group until drugs and the high-life of the gospel music world wrecked his marriage and drove him to country music. All boosh-whah made up in my own imagination, and I have no idea where it comes from.

 Here's something else to think about. I haven't smoked any pot in over six months. Imagine what I'm like when I'm stoned, and I used to stay stoned all the time.