I had my towel ..so I put out my thumb. There on some universal thread I went, a hitchhiker through a bend in time———no it was through a thin veil in time- space to a parallel universe just on the other side of physical perception.

I’d arrived not here . . . but there . . . on a ferry circling the Statue_of _Liberty; my eyes immediately focused on the Twin_Towers . . . that were still there. I instantly realized that Al_Gore had won the election, fair & square, and had been a two term President, winning the Nobel Prize as President of the United States. The budget surplus continued and the economy saw steadiness and some improvement. Du_bya had purchased full-partner ownership of the Ran_gers and they went on a record winning-streak only to end up in the biggest steroids scandal in Major_League history. We had been in the midst of a decade-long peacetime, with a relative calm in the Middle_East and Ga_za. Solar panels were commonplace on roofs all across the country and there was no major oil-spill catastrophe in the Gulf. Maya was never diagnosed with leukemia. Glass-Steagall was reinstated. Citiz_ens Un_ited did not form, but heavy oversight into corporate lobbying did. There was a huge across the board clean-up of the banking industry & Wall St., and Ch_en_ey was shot & killed in a freak penned-boar hunting accident by Rum_sfel_d, who went to trial and was acquitted …only to die of a brain aneurysm while masturbating to his own home-made sadistic porn, too ugly to be reported (this was not the story told the public, certainly, but it was just another piece of info of which I was instantly aware).