There is a type of person everyone will recognize.

Everyone recognizes him because there is one of him at all times in every social circle.

This kind of person wakes up one day and realizes that this reality which seems so spatially, temporally, metaphysically all-embracingly vast is, in fact, puny. Our knowledge is spun from the thinnest experiential threads, fed through the tiniest eye of a needle: I, here, now.

This allegedly infinitely large and ancient universe, filled with so many people, places, things and events, is just a film reel, and at each moment, the entirety of reality is confined to one celluloid square made entirely of mind. We watch square after square after square, and our memory creates an everything-everywhere-everyone-always of space, time, truth and history.

As tiny 6-year-old kids we go to school and sit in desks, and are trained to unceasingly remember (re-member) a world where brains are the organs of mind, where history happened in the past, where science and mathematics describes with rigorous precision what actually exists and how reality actually behaves, where some actions, beliefs and attitudes are bad and dumb and crazy and other actions, beliefs and attitudes are good and smart and sane, and so on and so on.

The thread glides through the needle’s eye. The celluloid squares are projected upon the screen. Soon we are fixated and immersed in a story that is so real to us that we stop noticing our own role in that story. We lose ourselves in an infinite eternity of reality.

Inevitably, this person we all know gets really, really excited, starts talking loudly and rapidly and obscurely and confidently, starts striking prophetic poses, and their company becomes intolerable* — and this goes on indefinitely, until that person finally realizes that this happens all the time to huge numbers of people, and each one of them is the first to whom it has happened in the story they are living.

Note: I call this phenomenon of the intense annoyingness of those drunk on their first conversion (metanoia) “metannoying”.  I should submit this grand dad joke to my imaginary newsletter dedicated to disseminating newly minted words of this kind. I am confident that The Reportmanteau would make it the cover story.