The strangest thing happened today. I visited the Borders bookstore on State and Randolph. While walking around I saw a sales clerk, but for a few moments he wasn’t identifiable as… anything. I looked at him and literally could not register what he was. I recognized a humanoid shape, but it was as if he’d transformed into a series of brightly flickering and colorful cubes, cylinders, and coils. He didn’t look mechanical. He looked abstract. Then he suddenly re-synced with the scene again, and all was normal. I felt slightly disappointed. Like I’d been given a  view of something I wasn’t supposed to see. An inkling of how things really worked.