This weekend, I had a really strange moment. Saturday afternoon, I left my house, walked one block to Charles Street, to the row of restaurants I walk past basically daily, and had been at the night before.
None of the restaurants where there.
Actually, restaurants were there, they just were not the ones I remembered from the night before. Thairish was replaced by some yuppie looking place with an aluminum sign... The other establishments on either side were also totally different... not just the signage, the whole facade was different, the planters were gone... it was a whole different street.
For a few disorienting moments, my mind raced, looking for a solution. I recalled a time when I lived in New York City and I had gotten a head injury and temporarily lost my sense of spacial awareness. I had wandered Manhattan, looking for my dorm, unable to discern west from east or even left from right. I lived on the east side, almost on the water, but when I walked the way I thought looked like the way home, I ended up on the west side. It took me quite a while to reason that, if this was the west side, I could then get to the east side by... walking in the opposite direction.
Perhaps, I thought, that something similar had happened to me, and I wasn't actually on the right street. So I looked around, and caught the familiar sight of the monument... no, this was the right block, alright. But it was not the same stores as were there the night before. Next, I mused... perhaps I had had some kind of brain event, a fugue, and I was in the relative future... perhaps I had just forgotten a few months of life and the storefronts I were remembering were out of date?
I shook that off and started to look around for clues. I could see that there were people standing around with walkie talkies, so I walked up to one and asked him. "Am I going crazy, or is this for a movie or something?" He laughed, probably other people had been similarly confused, and said it was indeed for a movie. I asked what movie, since I knew that a Scarlett Johansson romantic comedy was shooting in Baltimore currently. He looked at me suspiciously and replied "Uhhh... just some romantic comedy."
At least I am not crazy.
