Unreal

I wonder if in the future people will look back on nights like the one I got to have last night and doubt such things could really take place.

In the post-apocalyptic Mad Max-scenario dystopia, when humans have scorched the skies, cities lie in ruins, and the lakes have all been drained for bottled water, who will believe that you could congregate a gang of about three dozen bike riders and pedal across town under a luminous and non-lethal sunset, roll up to a liquor store and supermarket right next to each other for provisions and libations, and make it, just as dusk is settling in, to a smooth-as-glass body of non-toxic water, whose temperature is just warmer than the velvety night air, swim, dive, and paddle about, before wobbling ever so slightly through quiet residential streets to a bar called the Monkey Pub, that seems right out of Central Casting’s version of a divey college watering hole, then manage somehow to find yourself later, still en masse, around a blazing fire that no one even fell into, although, I believe, some arm hair got singed?

Won’t it seem impossibly quaint to our descendants, like stories of goin’ downriver on the Mississippi on a homemade raft, or pickin’ out a piece of gingham for Molly at the ol’ general store?

I kept having the Truman Show moment, where it was all too impossibly perfect to be real, although if it was just another episode in the series, the one thing I wish the director would have done differently was the end of the night, where it seemed to me that the departure home was like ball bearings dropped in a skillet, people scattering off in all directions, so that my route back to bed was far more random, solitary, and beset with concerns for my fellow revelers than anticipated, and did make me wonder, even in this day and age, whether all that had happened was really real.