You Are an Unreliable Narrator

When I was 20, I hitchhiked from Vancouver, BC back home to Anchorage. It took about 3 days, but only 8 rides, because the last guy took me more than 1,500 miles.

He was another good dude from Ohio headed to Ak for the summer to work as a park ranger. Before he picked me up he'd met 3 Maine hillbillies who were crammed into the cab of a tiny Toyota truck. We all camped together on an out-of-the way logging road.

As we were setting up camp in the late evening dusk of the northern spring, an enormous fireball blazed over head almost perpendicular to the road, before disappearing behind the tree line.

It was a few seconds at most. An enormous burning orb in the sky. A few hundred feet or more off the ground. I remember no sound, maybe because the brain cuts off hearing in high stress situations, maybe because years of accessing this memory have polished it to a high shine.

"What the fuck," I said, looking around at the others who had also stopped what they were doing to gawp at the sky.

"Crazy," one of them said.

"That was insane," I said.

But they were already back to what they were doing.

"Aren't we going to talk about this?" I said.

But no, we were not going to talk about it. No one mentioned it the whole night.

And for a long time, I didn't know why.

I woke up before dawn to my driver quietly packing his things. He may have intended to leave me, but once he saw me awake he motioned me to move and we quickly and quietly took off. The Mainers had gotten on his nerves the night before, after the meteor incident. We drove together for another day, met and fed a fox, talked about Jesus and baseball and nobody proselytized and I waived at every oncoming car (which was not that many) and spent the next night at my mom's old ranch out in Palmer. I'd been wandering for 9 months.

I never realized until just now that this happened on the last night of my first big trip.

But also...

I remember this incident well enough to report it to you, but I don't know how accurate my memory is.

I've accessed this memory hundreds if not thousands of times, and every time you remember something, you change it a little.

What I remember today is not exactly what happened that day.

This means that I am an unreliable narrator.

And because you and I are subject to the same general conditions, you are also an unreliable narrator.

Your memory is not what happened.

And you cannot entirely trust your own senses. Because your body excludes information that will be psychologically harmful for you.

This is deeply unsettling. Like the fact that none of us can be sure we're seeing the same color blue. It dissolves certainty and breaks our map of reality, undermining everything you think you know for certain.

It makes sense that when something strange or miraculous happens, that we filter it out. That doesn't look like anything to me - because we unconsciously know that even the slightest acknowledgement can deconstruct our world view and threaten our relationships and support systems.

Like Upton Sinclair said,

“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”

These kinds of checks on the borders of our reality happen all the time, but we almost always reject the premise to preserve our sense of sanity. To keep it in the dooryard. To keep things under control.

MAGA is a great example of this. But it's happening to me and you too. And while we are constantly offered the chance to peek our head over the fence, most of the time, we all choose not to. Even me.

When I was 20, it really shocked me when nobody wanted to talk about seeing an astronomical event up close. But it doesn't shock me any more.

All of us are pushed down Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs and struggling to survive, alienated, isolated, and deeply indoctrinated, just so that a good chunk of the value created by the work of each individual can be creamed off into secret accounts in the alps. Kowloon Bay, or along the banks of the Thames.

This is why people don't want to talk about the comet. It has been pushed out of awareness for more important survival concerns.

But it also means that we're operating with inferior data sets that lead us to stupid and disastrous conclusions.

If we think you know where the hard edges of reality are, the only thing we know for sure is that we're wrong. You and me are unreliable narrators. That is why we must always try to live on a bigger map!

Daniel