I think that the moment when I first began to suspect that I was in for an unusual trip came when I passed the ficus plant trying to hitch a ride along 288.  Really.  And there upon lies the story.  It was the evening of this Saturday last, I had just gotten off work after yet another fun- and chicken-filled day at Henricus, and was off on my merry way to jolly old Madison Virginia, home of absolutely nothing, but temporary location of numerous of my old college homies. 

            I’m not entirely sure whether the aforementioned ficus plant standing by the side of 288 with a suitcase was in fact the cause of the weirdness which was to ensue, or whether it was merely a harbinger of it.  All I know is that there was so totally no way on Earth I was gonna stop and pick it up, despite the fact that I had packed my usual supply of armaments that I take with me when I go on a road trip.  Crossbow, chainmaille, Potato Gun of Doom™, fun-size travel claymore, all these essential pieces of road tripping equipment were safely stowed away in the hold of my Minivan of Fury, yet still, I felt vaguely unsafe, and unwilling to trust in the angelic nature of ficus plants.

            After getting out of town though, things seemed to settle back into some semblance of normality for a while.  Until I got to Lousia.  There, it turned out to be the case that I needed to buy gas, potatoes, and Cheez-its.  With this in mind, I stopped by the local Food Lion, and stepped into a weird universe of terror that had nothing to do with their poor selection of firing yams.  What happened?  Read on, and be amazed:

            You see, as I walked into Food Lion, some guy almost ran into me.  Not like he wasn’t paying attention or something either, he was looking right ahead, where I happened to be standing in all my Benly awesomeness, but for whatever reason, he durn near bowled me over.  I moved on however, and thought no more of the situation, for about ten seconds.  What I encountered in the Food Lion at first struck me as odd, then unsettling, then completely freakish, then right back to just odd again. For you see, it was like absolutely nobody there could see me.  Seriously, like people kept almost running into me with their carts, forcing me to jump out of the way like I was in the weird Special Grocery Store edition of Frogger.  Those few who couldn’t quite ignore me completely acknowledged me with only a look of passing disgust and revulsion before going off along their ways, and leaving me very weirded out and thoroughly relieved to be out of that accursed Food Lion of Louisa.  So what exactly happened?  Here’s a few theories I’ve come up with after literally minutes of paranormal, quantum electrodynamic research:

            First, I think it highly possible that the ficus plant was actually generating some kind of weird subspace distortion field, that slightly phased me out of sync with our dimension, like that Reading Rainbow episode where LeVar Burton got hit by the warp reactor and he had to wander around with ship until Worf emitted some kind of radiation that brought him back into phase.  That’s why nobody saw me in the Food Lion, I was all ghostly and phantasmal, which would have been kind of cool if I’d known what was going on and tried to use my stealth powers for something awesome, like hurling a watermelon and Osama bin Laden, assuming he shops at the Louisa Food Lion.  I don’t even want to think about why a ficus plant would do all this in the first place, it was probably just mad because I wouldn’t give it a lift to wherever it is that ficus plants want to go to (probably hell, or worse, New Jersey).

            Or maybe, I wasn’t the one who was out of sync with reality.  Perhaps the entire town of Lousia was trapped in a recursion loop within the very space-time continuum itself.  And like, for the past 300 years, they all just keep repeating all the same stuff, unable to break free.  And like, since I was new and different, I was all crimping their trapped-in-a-neverending-purgatory-of-Food-Lion style, so they were miffed.  Or maybe it was because I took their last box of Garlic-flavored Cheez-its.  Either way, someone was messing with the fabric of reality, which is never cool, unless you’re doing it so you can ride around on a Quetzalcoatl or buy some Ecto Cooler or vote for William Howard Taft.

            In truth though, I think that what was actually happening was this:  You see, a bajillion years ago, when Lousia was build by the Ancients, it was an earthly paradise, a perfect society, where everything was totally sweet and it rained waffles and everybody had their own helper monkey whether they needed one or not.  It was all ruled by the High Archon Billy, Potentate of All Louisa.  But lo, Billy knew that he would not live forever, and so he built a totally awesome robot version of himself to rule the city after he died, or returned to his home planet of Thanagar, or went back to college or whatever.  And everything was cool for a bout two weeks, and then somebody spilled a Diet Coke on this robot, and it went all crazy and decided that the only way to enslave all the good people of Louisa, and make them into some kind of werewolf zombies, or zombie werewolves, and even though they all recognized me as an outsider, they couldn’t really do anything aside from stymie my efforts to buy snack crackers and leer at me.  Also, zombie werewolf zombies are weak against crossbows and potatoes.

            Anyway, eventually I made it out to Madison, which is so far out in the middle of nowhere that a nearby highway sign points the way to Richmond and also to Syria, which shouldn’t even be on the same continent, but that’s probably still just the ficus plant distorting reality.