Parallel Universe, USA

There's at least one parallel universe that I know about because I've lived in it most of my life and still do. I enter it through a hideous black hole every time I wake up in the morning.

It's an unrealistic realm where no one reads a book unless they see an ad for it on TV, a place where learning ends on high school graduation night and Madison Avenue tutors the young who have been nursed on fairy tales about happy consumers living in sit-com houses.

Nothing goes "bump in the night" in this parallel universe because all the bogeymen carry cell phones and PDA's and MP3 players and you can spot them coming a mile away.

Manhattan Wormhole

I was actually lost in a wormhole once, repeatedly trapped in it for over two years. It was a twisted and horrifying time corridor between Snow Shoe, Pennsylvania and Manhattan Island. I entered it each time I went to the post office to mail a query to a literary agent, along with a bio, synopsis and the first three chapters of a novel manuscript or whatever it was that their listing indicated in the current volume of Writer's Market.

Then the strangest things would happen. Via the same wormhole I would get back letters from the agents I'd queried, telling me about the books they had written and where to buy them, with no further mention of the book for which I was trying to secure representation. Well, I knew I wasn't in The Twilight Zone because that was merely a figment of Rod Serling's fertile imagination.

The wormhole suddenly closed one day and I stopped receiving replies from agents altogether. I eventually forgot all about it. But, I was walking past the post office in Snow Shoe today and I saw the dark spiral of twisted time descending again like a waterspout.

Then I ran.