This is not a Dream. This really happened.


One day I climbed the long steps up to The Crooked Lookout and to my surprise there was a weathered and shirtless old man with long white hair on my balcony throwing big indiscernible bits of wood, plastic and cardboard over the rail and down into the rusted-out bed of his red truck four stories below.  


I was surprised because my neighbor (the only other person who resided on the fourth floor) had moved to New Zealand a month before and so no one had been on our porch since except me.  


I was also surprised because it seemed like it would be against the rules to throw things over the rail even though many times I have wanted to do it myself.  Just dangerous and the sort of thing that a good citizen wouldn't do. 


The throwing-man greeted me warmly as if we had known each other for a long time.  As I got my bearings, I realized that the man wasn't old at all.  His skin was weathered from a lifetime of laboring in the sun and his bleached white hair was just a more extreme version of the greying that I too am experiencing.  I realized that he was actually close to my age and I thought to myself that - maybe I should know him?  Given the warmth of his greeting?  I answered his greeting with a polite (but probably nervous) greeting of my own and went inside.  Once inside I had two competing thoughts:  

1.) He's my new neighbor and he was forging a relationship and now I'll have to work harder to be warm and winsome because I might have been perceived as being aloof in that interaction.  

2.)  What if in some cosmic twist of reality...he was...ME?  I mean there are probably competing versions of ourselves everywhere, right?  Places where our grandparents made opposing choices, where the luck of our birth or the misfortune of the first person we kissed altered our paths in such monumental ways that we can barely recognize our own selves when we meet ourselves on the street.  

I cooked my dinner.  I read my novel while I ate.  I thought about what would happen if I opened the door and looked at him with intent.  

Would I see my doppelgänger looking back at me beneath a fringe of white hair yellowed with too much nicotine? 

Eventually before I went to bed, I tentatively looked out the window.  He was gone, but there was a glow from the next door window.  A light was still on.  I opened my door and stuck my head out farther - the red pick-up truck down below was gone. No possibility could be ruled out.  

I went inside and slept.  

In the morning I crept slowly across the porch and could tell that there was no movement inside.  I thought:  A furniture-less inverted version of my apartment would be a great visual illustration of a kind of latent inverted psychological state if, in case I ever wanted to write a story like that.  

So I put my phone up and snapped the picture above.  I didn't even notice til later in the day that the morning light and the reflecting window had splayed the beautiful treetops across the walls of the negative-apartment.  

When I turned around  I was startled.  

A perfectly formed "V" of geese flew slowly past at eye level.  

It was at that moment that I realized: my whole life I have been yearning toward the part of my life where I would finally have found a mountain to ascend where I could sit and wait for searchers to climb and we would have complicated conversations and I would ask provocative questions and then answer their heartfelt queries with riddles and parables that sat in their memories like fulginous windows that may eventually yield clarity.  I had been waiting to bee a seer, a bard (I chose my internet psuedonym way back in the days of aol online to be redbaerd (an inversion of redbeard - my surname's literal irish meaning), a precursor toward this ambition of mine. 

And when those geese flew by me so slow and near and peaceably, I realized that this is my mountain and seeing negative-me throwing crap into the truck was just a way of getting the scales to loosen from my eyes. 

Not too many have climbed up the Crooked Lookout for our conversations.  It is tall and precariously crooked.  But at least now I'm ready for them.   

I'm almost sure too, that my negative-Andrew or my opposite-Self is somewhere relating an inverted version of this story to an equally baffled audience.  Hopefully all of the audiences will sit with this tale for a while.  If you wait, the geese will fly low and near and it will all reveal itself for what it is.

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