The Mandela Effect

The Mandella Effect
 
Imagine: You’re wandering through a thrift store, through the holiday decorations – Christmas is a month out and it’s a mess of Santas Claus and Jesus bullshit. Turn the corner and there are the cups. Just a lot of cups. Then kitchen implements, home décor, knick knacks, craft supplies, collectibles.  You pass the shoes and the clothes – no mothball trousers for you today – and the electronics to the media section. 
You flip through the CD rack.  You’ve no use for a CD – What a garbage technology! – but you’re wistful by nature and CDs used to mean a lot to you.  Maybe you’ll activate some dormant memories.  There’s the usual assortment – Christmas compilations, boy bands, post grunge, rap rock, classical, Blues Traveler, Amy Grant, some vaguely emo looking something you’ve never heard of. 
And then you find it: Pearl Jam’s fifth studio album, Yield, released in 1998.  This album meant a lot to you as a teenager, and the mere sight of the cover sends you back to the shag carpeted, incense musked basement bedroom of your youth.  You’ve spent a lot of time in thrift stores over the years and never come across this album.  It wasn’t particularly popular upon its release as Pearl Jam had ceased to be the cultural behemoth it once was and evolved into a band for Pearl Jam fans, not the world at large. 
You flip open the gatefold – Pearl Jam had shunned the typical crystal pack for three records now – to find the fold in booklet.  You smell it.  It smells just as you remember.  Like good paper. Thick paper. You flip through, a vague smile on your face. Love swells in your bosom. 
Then you see something that confuses you.  A picture of Matt Cameron, drummer for Soundgarden and FUTURE drummer of Pearl Jam.  But not until the next album, Binaural, which isn’t very good. Jack Irons played drums on Yield!
You’re sure of it.
You flip to the back of the booklet, to the credits.  Eddie Vedder, vocals/guitar/ukulele, Jeff Ament, bass, Stone Gossard, guitar, Mike McCready, guitar.  All checks out.
And then the drummer: MATT CAMERON!
“My god!,” you think.  “What is happening!  This can’t be! Surely this can’t be! My memory is infallible! My Pearl Jam knowledge is infallible! Matt Cameron was NOT the drummer on Yield!  He wasn’t! Impossible! The world is crumbling at my feet! Everything I thought I knew has been called into question!  Have I gone mad! Has mania gripped my brain meat! NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO!”
You scream and run from the store, pushing over an old lady and an entire Menonite family in the process, open the door with such force that it swings from its hinges, slaps against the plate glass store front, shattering it.  You run and run and run and run till all civilization is behind you, run until your legs cramp up and you fall to the leafy floor of a dark and mysterious woods, panting and weeping.
You are never heard from again.
You’ve just experienced the scourge infecting millions upon millions of people all over the world.
It’s called The Mandella Effect, and there’s nothing stopping it from afflicting you or someone you love.
Some background:
The Mandela Effect was discovered by an adult reading a children’s book.  Their name has been lost to time, but the book was one in The Berenstain Bears series by Stan and Jan Berenstain.  They are about a gender normative family of bears that live in a tree and may or may not be farmers of some sort. They are vaguely Christian but not in a “We’ve read and understand the bible” kind of way.  They’re very relatable to many Americans.
Anyway, the aforementioned adult reading a children’s book had a similar experience to the one previously detailed.
They were astounded to find that the name of the books was not Berenstien, spelled b-e-r-e-n-s-t-i-e-n, but Berenstain, spelled b-e-r-e-n-s-t-a-i-n.
This shook them to their very core. 
But instead of disappearing into the woods, they took to the internet. And, as it happened, their core was not the only core shaken.
Seemingly everyone agreed that this was simply not correct and the topic caught on and spread like a head cold in a DMV. Investigations were made. Videos were proffered. Further examples of the phenomenon were discovered.
One example in particular gave the phenomenon its name.  Many people were absolutely certain that anti-apartheid revolutionary, philanthropist and all around hero Nelson Mandela had died during his unjust prison term sometime in the early 1980s and were furious to find out that he’d continued to be one of the greatest people on earth for years after his release from hellish confinement.
So, The Mandela Effect was born.
Some other popular examples:
There used to be a Jiffy brand peanut butter.  Now there’s just Jif.
Curious George used to have a tail.
There once was a t in the brand name Skechers.
The monopoly man had a monocle.
Various other minor misspellings and character details and song lyrics.  You get the picture.
 
So what is The Mandela Effect?  I think we can say absolutely that it’s definitely not just a bunch of goofuses slightly misremembering trivialities from their long passed childhoods. With that out of the way, we’re left with several options.
Option 1: The Mad Swiss Scientists at the CERN laboratories ran their bony fingers through their wild, white hair, adjusted their comically thick spectacles, rubbed their dry palms together, cackled maniacally and smashed two atoms together in the Large Hadron Collider in 2014, which done broke time and space as we know it.
Option 2: Parallel Dimensions exist side by side, each deviating only slightly from the one next to it, and we slip between them like Keanu Reeves’s English accent in that Dracula movie.  Those hubristic Swedes may have exacerbated the slippage.
Option 3: We live in a simulation, are nothing more than the hyper complex, anxiety riddled Sims of a highly advanced civilization.  The idea here is that technology – Virtual Reality and Artificial Intelligence, specifically – are advancing by proverbial leaps and bounds all the time.  Surely, at some point in the future, we’ll be able to create autonomous or semi-autonomous virtual people and control their world.  In this theory, we are actually those automatons, or maybe automatons of the automatons onward to infinity.
In this line of thinking, the life and death of Nelson Mandela are nothing but a glitch in the system or the whim of a future teenager loaded up on goof balls.
Option 4 is similar to option 3 except that it pre-supposes that the Matrix films were on to something other than tacky sunglasses, black dusters, and emboldening school shooters.
Option five is my favorite, and goes back to the idea of parallel dimensions. This one’s actually fairly comforting. The idea is that when we die of anything but old age, we jump dimensions into the one closest to us. In the dimension we’re leaving, we’re dead, but in the new dimension – which is ALMOST identical to the one we just left – our life goes on with nothing more than the memory of a potential near death experience, if that.
An example:
Say you’re dicing up some ham to make a delicious ham salad for a potluck this weekend.  You know damn well that no one likes ham salad, but you do, so you’re going to bring it, enjoy it yourself, and then have plenty to take home for later.
 
You’re chop, chop, chopping away, salivating at the thought of wrapping your lips around all of that salty ham drowning in thick, creamy Hellman’s Mayonnaise, when the doorbell rings.  You set down your knife and go to the door.  When you open it up, there is a stranger.
He is a tweenage boyscout selling popcorn to raise money to go camping, or for knot education or whatever.  You buy some popcorn. Always feels good to help a youngster and don’t nothing beat a big old bowl of air popped popcorn.
You go back to your ham salad, feeling pretty good about yourself, when suddenly, out of nowhere you are struck by a deep, sticky malaise.
It comes from nowhere and means nothing, but it’s all around you.  You’re suddenly sad and hopeless and the ham salad seems like a bad idea and your air popper broke last week. You’d forgotten about that.
Why can’t anything ever work out for you?
You set the knife down again and go to sit in your living room and do the breathing exercises your therapist taught you to do in times like these.  You sit with your back straight, eyes closed, and breathe, slowly, in through the nose and out through the mouth, for three minutes.
This helps, if only a little, and you’re proud of yourself for identifying your negative feelings for what they are – generalized anxiety – and doing something constructive about them.
Then a blue Chevrolet Colorado smashes through your front window and crushes you against the oak bookshelf you splurged and bought for yourself for Christmas last year, killing you instantly.
Now, in your current dimension, life will go on without you in it.  Your friends and family will be sad, will miss you deeply.  There will be a funeral.  They will learn to go on.  Your absence will become normal to them, but every once in a while they’ll see a ham salad and remember how great you were or a blue Chevrolet Colorado and be furious at the injustice of the world.
Meanwhile, in the dimension nearest ours, both of your legs are broken and you’re screaming in pain, confused by this unexpected turn of events, worried that you are maybe paralyzed or your testicles got crushed.  Your neighbors will rush out of their houses to find out what just happened.  They’ll step through the wreckage of your living room to find an old man behind the wheel of the blue Chevrolet Colorado. He’s just had a stroke and lost control of his vehicle and they’ll see you against the bookshelf, grimacing and struggling to get free. The paramedics will be called, and you’ll spend a week in the hospital and a few months after that on bedrest and then on crutches.
Four years later you’ll find out that Jack Iron’s wasn’t the drummer on Pearl Jam’s fifth album, Yield, and go screaming into the woods, just another victim of The Mandela Effect.
Or something like that.
What happens when you die of old age is anyone’s guess.  It’s not a very well thought out theory.
I’ve had two brushes with the Mandala effect, outside of the Pearl Jam album thing which I made up. 
Anyway. For years I had a very distinct memory of catching Gary Gaetti’s homerun ball in Game 6 of the 1987 Major League Baseball World Series.  Even had a ball that I told people was THAT ball.
I was sure of this story.
Turns out, however, that Gary Gaetti did not hit a home run in Game 6 of the 1987 World Series.  Also turns out I was not at that game or any other World Series game that year or any other, for that matter. I was four.
Spooky.
The second is a vague memory I have of getting my head stuck between the cast iron railings of our apartment balcony when I was three.  The fire department had to come and get me out.
I told this story to a co-worker once, and he looked skeptical, then mentioned that this may have happened on an episode of Designing Women.
It occurred to me that he might be right.  I had watched a fair amount of Designing Women in my youth.
I don’t know what was more surprising: That my memory was apparently incorrect – or had it been altered! – or that the two of us were both fluent enough in Designing Women trivia to have a conversation about it fifteen years after the show went off the air.
Let’s suppose for a second that the Mandela effect isn’t a paradox and/or conspiracy.
Let’s suppose, improbably, that people are misremembering things in a very reasonable and demonstrable way.
Why has the idea of the Mandela Effect gained so much traction in people’s imagination?
First, I think, is just nostalgia.  It’s fun to think about things from the past that you rarely have occasion to consider. It’s why I spend a weird amount of time looking at pictures of discontinued foods on the Internet.  It takes you back to a different time when a particular brand of fruit snacks seemed central to your existence.
Side note: This may be another example of the Mandela Effect.  As a stoned teenager, my favorite food was Chiquita Banana Fruit Snacks.  They were gelatinous and dense and there were banana ones, and strawberry banana, and orange banana.  I used to put them in the freezer and then eat whole boxes at a time.
My friend Tony remembers my obsession with them, but no one else seems to.  I can’t even find a picture of them on the Internet, let alone information.
So, let me just say now, if anyone listening has any information about Chiquita Banana Fruit Snacks, please contact me.  Anyone who can obtain and send some to me will be awarded with TWENTY AMERICAN DOLLARS!
The second reason people are so fascinated by the Mandela Effect is that something about the time we’re living in seems . . . broken.
Nearly everyone you meet has good intentions, but as a society we seem to be descending into something sad and terrible and nobody knows how to stop it.
It’s scary.
An explanation, at the very least, would be nice.
If the world isn’t as we perceive it and there’s been some kind of glitch, well, that’s something anyway.
And if we can name it, or name its symptoms, maybe we can do something about it.
Probably, though, we’ll just spend the next year or so sporadically arguing online about how Cheez Its used to be spelled before forgetting all about it and focusing on the next minor, meaningless controversy and clinging to our immediate, observable reality as the world plummets into chaos or doesn’t.
Either way, I’m going to go listen to Yield. 
That, anyway, is just as I remember it.