Bend Reality

As something of a low-rent tech bro, all of Jonathon Tamberlay’s professional heroes had eventually made their way down to South America for a psychedelic retreat, sipping ritualistic tea in a hut deep in a forest in order to expand their minds into something unhinged and malleable, perfect for returning to their fledgling startups to jabber on about how their new app idea will turn the world on its head by finally delivering Tinder for house cats or Uber for pogo sticks or an all-new AI-enabled self-driving…something.

But that kind of thing costs a lot of money and Jonathon hadn’t yet tasted the sweet milk of venture capital funding, so there he sat in his value-priced hotel room, staring at the wall and waiting for the combination of Mentos, Diet Coke, and Taco Bell fire sauce to do its magic and make him see the real truth of the world and feel the universe without boundary or pretense. So far, the main thing he’d seen was old episodes of Jersey Shore and the only thing he’d felt was the need to run to that bathroom a handful of times (all gassy, bloaty false alarms).

He was, however, starting to feel a little dizzy. And that was something.

Deciding that now might be the time for some serious mind expansion, he decided he’d better make sure his phone was charged. He’d set up a shortcut on the home screen to start recording so that he’d be sure to capture every nuanced insight and brain-bending realization. He grabbed his cord and crouched down to have a look at the outlet tucked away between the nightstand and the bed. You could plug two things in back there. One was the lamp. The other was the alarm clock, he yanked both free and stared.

Why should he be limited to two outlets, he wondered, completely forgetting to turn on his phone camera to capture this important thought. Forgetting the charging cord, he stared. Somewhere on the delicate knife’s edge that separates reality from imagination, Jonathon watched the outlets as they seemed to pulsate. First, they multiplied. He could plug in four things now! And then, just as he was imagining how some of his clunky cords were known to block adjacent plugs, rending the multiple outlets useless, he began to imagine that the outlets themselves could delicately rotate, freeing themselves from the self-imposed prison of uniform conformity that had always held hostage man’s greatest ambitions to plug a bunch of things with clunky charging blocks all in the same place.

Moments later, he imagined USB ports sprinkled into the mix—two of them. He could meet his charging needs with or without clunky power bricks. He had stared into the universe and now, finally, the universe had stared back.

After what could have been hours but really very probably was not, it happened—the universe blinked.

Jonathon fell backwards onto the thin carpet and fired off an involuntary Diet Coke belch that threatened to betray all the fire sauce packets with which he had chased the Mentos. Mind expansion was risky business, after all.

Panting and exhausted, he packed his things.

It wasn’t a Peruvian Ayahuasca retreat. But damned if he didn’t come home with a hell of a vision for a surge protector.