For the longest time, curling had a mythical status for me.

It was not a real sporting event of any kind, but a massive parody one brought up to mock how everything (like the golf, bowling or god damn poker that somehow finds itself on a ‘sports’ channel) is a sport nowadays. I am fairly sure I first heard mention of  this pseudo sport at some point in the 90’s from a Lewis Black comedy special, and to be frank I never gave it too much thought there after. At some point, someone explained to me not only that it was a real sport, but also an explanation of how the sport worked. This explanations was given in such a mocking tone I just assumed no one was taking it seriously.

Now, admittedly, I have spent the majority of the 00’s and half of the 10’s outside of the US, but no one ever really spoke to me of curling as being anything of interest in that period of time. Nor did I ever encounter it naturally in my adventures about, nor even heard it mentioned on the TV when the winter olympics were on. Hell, I even attended  (albeit briefly) the 2006 winter olympics in Turin (as a spectator) and never heard a single mention of this ridiculous sport.

And yet, in a reality shift I can only credit to the Mandela effect, curling seems to be all the rage in this local presentation of the universe. And it makes no fucking sense to me.

It started with my making a joke to a friend about how we would get such wonderful sports as curling for this year’s olympic games. He quipped back that he liked Curling.

Of course, I didn’t believe him. But he insisted, and I just assumed he wanted to take a joke to far when, hours later, he was still insisting that he did indeed like it.

But then, maybe a week or two later, I go to a different friends house and he is  watching curling. I asked him why, and he tells me that he likes it. Again, this is met with incredulity from my part, and then I notice that his ten year old son is intently watching it, and can explain the complexities of the sport seemingly unscripted. It would appear that yes, they really do like it (and no, my first friend did not put them up to this, because they do not know each other. Most of my friends do not know each other. It’s a divide and conquer tactic I’ve been employing for years, generated back in my paranoid ol’ days).

The fuck…

But when I was at that last friends house watching it on the TV, I must have broken some seal to a dimension of eldritch horror, because after that Curling just appeared out in the world around me. Just about the city, I would see curling being played on TV’s as if there were some kind of fucking demand for it.

So if you are reading this and you are from the normal, sane, universe of my birth, let the scientist know that I have fallen through. Send help.