"Yes. Probability hiccups." There were plenty of webinars and YouTube channels that wielded the same gobbly-gook vocabulary as Jude, a multitude of personalities who insisted that aliens had helped Moses part the Red Sea and that the power of the universe was in your hands if you concentrated on the correct runes with your third eye. In fairness to the easily-dismissed prophets, many great thinkers had been written off as madmen and crocks before their equations and history vindicated them; Eastern medicine was even experiencing a revival, with the decline of Western capitalism. Maybe what Jude needed was a livestreaming channel -- he was younger and more attractive than many of the washed-up hippies aligning their chakras.
The tea brought civility and ritual into the chaos of the evening. Really, everything had gone off the rails starting with bad manners -- Jude had not come in through the front door. The puff of steam from the kettle was a defibrillator, recalibrating the heart attack of the past few hours. Jude found two infusers in a drawer, and brought them to the sink to rinse them off.
"Northern California," he answered. He looked over his shoulder and arched his eyebrows. Is that what you meant? Sometimes people meant where he was from from -- which, in his case, was much harder to explain. Aiming to block that fork in conversation, he said, "I took a bus." For part of it. Bus terminals had security cameras. So many cameras, so many eyes to avoid.
The tea brought civility and ritual into the chaos of the evening. Really, everything had gone off the rails starting with bad manners -- Jude had not come in through the front door. The puff of steam from the kettle was a defibrillator, recalibrating the heart attack of the past few hours. Jude found two infusers in a drawer, and brought them to the sink to rinse them off.
"Northern California," he answered. He looked over his shoulder and arched his eyebrows. Is that what you meant? Sometimes people meant where he was from from -- which, in his case, was much harder to explain. Aiming to block that fork in conversation, he said, "I took a bus." For part of it. Bus terminals had security cameras. So many cameras, so many eyes to avoid.