Sometimes I think about how many great experiences people have that I probably never will. Some lucky people, for example, get to see a baby gray whale up close.
This aerial photo provided by DolphinSafari.com shows a baby gray whale in Dana Point Harbor, seen during Captain Dave’s Dolphin and Whale Watching Safari in Dana Point, Calif., Tuesday, Aug. 8, 2017. The whale, about 15 to 18 feet long, swam into a shallow children’s area called Baby Beach and circled a pier. Kayakers were able to get within a few feet of the animal, which at one point swam under paddle boarders.
When I travelled across the country talking with people last year, after we got to chatting a while I would sometimes bring up this web site and my hobby of finding things for it. If they seemed interested I’d ask,
“What is the strangest thing that ever happened to you?”
Some had seen UFOs, Bigfoot, aliens, angels, or ghosts. Some had won or found money, two yolks in the same egg, and so on. Not many had physical evidence or relevant checkable facts, so I’d just empathize, enjoy the stories and keep them in the back of my mind.
Others, however, would say something like,
“Nothing strange ever happened to me. I’ve lived in this same town all my life. It’s all been very predictable.”
Then I would wonder if they were just being shy for one reason or another. Those types are the people with the wildest experiences, right?
What’s the strangest thing that ever happened to you?
Email me if you don’t want to post a public comment here but wouldn’t mind telling someone with an open minded ear:
Xeno@xenomail.us
Sometimes a stranger who investigates improbable oddities is better than a friend for these kind of things.
Okay, this is crazy…
As I was hiking and dictating this, a stranger on the side of the road stopped weedwacking and he asked me if I was “making good time.” It was a surreal scene for some reason and I laughed. I said, “Yes, I’m almost there.” I knew where I was quite well and my stop was just around the corner. Then he said, “That’s good, we like making good time.”
As I walked on the narrow mountain road, stepping aside as logging trucks came around the corners, the surroundings got less familiar and I eventually pulled out a map app. What the..!!? I had been transported. The physical displacement of 1.1 miles seemed impossible for the time I’d been walking. I turned around and walked back on the road from which I’d come, but it was an unfamiliar road.
The logical explanation turned out to be that I overshot my destination, but there’s no way I walked an extra mile in such a short time … and what about that White Rabbit with a pocket watch by the side of the road?
“We like making good time.”
Hmm.
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TrueStrange.com
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