The Mystery of the Paranoiac-Critical Method As Applied to Random Encounters in a Vast Space-Time Array

This happens to you all the time, right? You're standing in line to purchase tickets to enter an art museum (seriously flawed concept, by the way), standing out there on, say, a street very much like Michigan Avenue in a city far from your home, a city very much like Chicago. It's sorta blustery, because that's how it would be in October in a city very much like Chicago, yes? Perhaps it's raining or drizzling. Perhaps you've already marched through one museum and you're older and tireder than you should be, and you have shooting pains in your legs and your back hurts and you don't really like this city, which you have visited mostly for the sake of visiting its ownself, and for the sake of being A Good Person.

And down the sidewalk comes someone you know, a friend of sorts, a casual associate of other sorts. Someone horribly out of context, someone who is also far from his home, which is not in the same city as yours, someone for whom you have some degree of affection tempered by some lesser degree of caution owing to circumstances beyond this person's control (perhaps he is a reporter, who has taken, for no reasons discernable under any rational framework, an interest in something once dear to you).

"Dirk!" (not his real name, and believe me, he'd be snortaciously--possibly even cripplingly--amused at my choice of pseudonyms for him) you yell, "Dirk Steelgod!" And you and Dirk (who is in this city and on this street and in this part of the physics weave for reasons as random and unrelated to Anything as your very own) embrace warmly in the cold and wet on this street much like Michigan Avenue in a city much like Chicago, and there is much conversation and gladness and catchup, as Dirk walks with you in line for a bit so that you can all catch up (Dirk knows your companion, as well, and in some ways they've as much in common as you and Dirk ever do).

And some not-large number of minutes passes, and everyone embraces warmly again, and goes about their paths through the multiverse, thence back to their homes in cities much like Washington and New York, having unexpectedly dealt with some of the duties--and joys--of friendship.

All the freakin' time, right?