pop

So. Yesterday Nick came by. We lounged around the living room getting really stoned, then went out to buy some more weed for him to take home, then to a cafe to work. And a weird thing happened.

We got to the cafe and started to settle down: ordered our drinks, took out our computers. As I was waking up the Surface and deciding what to work on, Nick plugged his power brick in and suddenly I heard this pop and saw a brief flash of light filling the place, followed by an equally brief flash of darkness – about 1/24 of a second for both of them together. And then the Surface had locked up. Wasn't responding to stylus, touch, or the Bluetooth keyboard. Pointer was sitting on the Illustrator icon, which I was about to switch to. Didn't respond to the power button after I tried turning it off, until Nick googled how to force-reset it (hold down power for 30s).

It came back up fine and I got a nice chunk of drawing done, while listening to an ambient spaceship noise generator. But damn that was weird. I have no idea of the actual reality of any of this; I mentioned the flash to Nick once I had the Surface running again, and he hadn't experienced it. So it was probably something internal to my still-pretty-stoned brain.

Worth mentioning: earlier in the morning I'd installed a system update that promised better Bluetooth reliability for the Surface, which has definitely been one of the flies in the ointment about the thing. And on the way from American Mary to Tea Republik, we passed a couple of guys who were arguing, and I'd swear that their voices were overlaid with static for a moment as they came into hearing. Nick was talking at the time so he wouldn't have noticed anything, even if it was something outside my skull.

Also probably unrelated but maybe worth mentioning: I'd taken out my navel piercing and was thinking of letting it heal up. And just now before writing this post, the back of my head rather emphatically told me I wasn't doing that, and made me put it back in.

Anyway. That is a weird thing that happened that may have just been stoned imagination and coincidence, might have been a warning sign of something breaking in my brain, might have been reality falling apart around me for an instant. Who the fuck knows.