Like so many other Terrans, I grew up in a house. The house was located in Aztec, New Mexico. I even remember the name of the road, San Juan Ave. (My friend Royal can still recall my old phone number, a landline, connected to a yellow phone mounted to the wall in a hallway in the house; this was back in the ante-nomophobia era). There was a picture window. Some kind of floral pattern on the couch and chairs. There was a television.
In that house, via that television, I know that I watched a TV series. Yes, fine, I watched more than one, that is not the point of this anecdote. The point is that there was a particular series I watched, and I’m positive I watched it in that house in the late 1980s.
The series was Sliders. Perhaps you remember this show. A young genius type discovers a portal to various parallel, alternate Earth’s. He and his entourage travel through these parallel dimensions on a quest to return to their own earth. Each dimension of Earth had some variation from the "reality" we experience. In one episode, they tackled the subject of gender politics. Women were running everything in that dimension and men were dealing with suppression. One episode imagined what would happen if the Summer of Love had never ended.
Some time back, it became available on Netflix. It claimed the show was from 1995.
No. No, it was somewhere around 1988.
By ‘95 I had been married for three years and had a child on the way. And I lived here, in Kingman, Arizona. It seems certain to me that I would remember watching that show with my nascent family if it had indeed happened in 1995. My wife doesn't remember watching it with me. See? It clearly happened in the late 80s, before I met my wife.
That blasted archive of all knowledge known as Wikipedia had the audacity to agree with Netflix. Sliders began, wrote the anonymous know-it-all-and-sooooooo-misinformed writer of the entry for this show, in 1995. The rest of the Internet, in keeping with its conspiratorial nature, agreed.
This was my first encounter with the Mandela Effect.
Tell us more of this enigmatic phenomenon named after a South African philanthropist, you say. I hearken to your clamor.
The Mandela Effect refers to collective memories that don’t jive with what many call reality. Some say they are false memories. One example is my experience above with Sliders. My mind clearly tells me when I watched, evidence indicates otherwise. So, which is right? My memory or the data “they” have collected?
Here are some other examples of this Mandela Effect:
The most well known is likely the namesake of the memory anomaly:
- Paranormal researcher Fiona Broome evidently coined this term when she became aware that she and many other people believed that Nelson Mandela died in prison in the 1980s. He did not die until 2013, thoroughly tripping out Broome and her contingent.
- There is a group of people convinced that the comedian Sinbad made a movie called Shazam sometime in the 1990s. Why they would want to think this should be it’s own phenomenon.
- There was, maybe still is, a series of children's books based on a family of bears, the Berenstain Bears - or was it spelled Berenstein?
There are doubtless more. Look up “Mandela Effect” on the Internets and have a ball.
That's great, you say. People's memories are wonky. Why give this issue a name? It is because of the theories people have regarding why their memory is wonky. They don't believe in the wonkiness. They believe there is something else happening.
Some contend that these alternate memories prove that portions of the world's population are from another dimension, ala Sliders, thus they recall these events as they occurred in their native dimension which is different from the way events unfolded in this dimension, the one wherein you are reading this blog post. In my original dimension, Sliders was on TV in 1988; Nelson Mandela died in prison. I cannot express how thankful I am that the Sinbad thing did not happen in either of the dimensions in which I have existed. How, exactly, are some of us transferring dimensions and others are not?
It may be a perfectly normal spacetime event that we have simply not observed empirically or otherwise as yet ... or it's CERN's fault. There are those who claim that CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, experiments have allowed this dimensional shifting. They are seeking to substantiate the multiverse theory, after all. Maybe they did it.
Here's a description of one of their experiments. "The neutron time-of-flight facility (nTOF) studies neutron-nucleus interactions for neutron energies ranging from a few meV to several GeV." I mean, if that doesn't just scream, "we are opening a time portal," well I don't know what does. Perhaps they have succeeded. Shadowy figures are traveling into the past and rewriting history and that's why certain things and events are slightly different for us. Apparently, they are in beta-testing of this program and only doing inconsequential things such as renaming children's books. I'm glad to know that even in the future government funded science ops are still absolutely daft. Hope blooms ...
It is also possible that these memory problems are from glitches in the matrix. The robot alien overlords like to dink around with their flesh batteries. "Unplug them just a little so they think Sinbad was a superhero, tee-hee-hee." Jerks.
For anyone who has actually read this far, well, I salute you. Go forth and buy yourself a treat of some kind and look in a mirror and tell yourself how bloody awesome you are. Now I come to the point at last.
All of the above is due to Black Bridge Brewery and brewer Tim Schritter, in particular. I was there one eve, as is my wont (might've been an afternoon, actually ... curse you, CERN!) and Mr Schritter happened to mention that he had a Belgian beer coming on soon that I would enjoy. It was called Door to Hell.
I said, "Great, that was a good beer."
He responded with something like, "You are a moron. I've never had that beer on tap here. It was a pilot brew that [my mentor] and I did."
I just stood there aghast and flabbergasted and all those silly things and mumbled some kind of, "but I'm sure I had it." (And I did, see, in MY dimension).
Whatever. In any dimension, it was a good beer. It is a good beer. All this shifting is demolishing my grasp on grammatical sense and tense.
Here are some notes on the actual drinking of Door to Hell, a Belgian Quad, in this current dimension. And, no, I am sorry, I did not use a proper Belgian goblet. I'm sure I should be punished for that. Maybe I was, in another dimension.
The Smelly Parts
At first, there was caramel and vanilla. And then some maple. That melded into a grassy, resinous field. It was spiky, if that makes sense. Sharp, alcoholic notes rose from the field. There's a lot to unpack in the nose of this one.
The Optics
Condescendingly clear and a bit on the dark side. A subdued brownish red with bubbly white head. It looks completely unassuming but well put together. Like Mr Bond, James Bond.
The Gustatory Dimension
There's no escaping the dark fruit nature of this beauty. You know, the figs, the dates and then there is bourbony caramel. It's also little dry, nicely crisp and juicy. Sugar and crystal, like sequins on a slinky dress. It is sweet, rich and heavy. Hops did not appear except in the aroma.
The Last Words
Approved. It doesn't have the fusty, earthy character of Belgian beers but does have a vinous quality. It's quite nearly Shakespearean, really, a confluence of influence, poetic palate, tragic if you drink too much at once for it is not wanting in alcohol quantity.