We pull into a truck stop north of Temple. We’re REALLY tired, and the trip is almost over. We file in sullenly, draw various coffee products and go to the checkout.

The chipper young counter help peers at me intently.

“Three days on the road. We’re really tired.”

“I… don’t want to ask.”

“DC to Austin”, I respond, wondering why this is something not wanting to be asked.

She peers at me even more intently, and I realize she’s reading the custom shirt I had made.

“I… have dropped… my glass of water on the floor?”

“It’s a joke.”, I said.

“An *inside* joke”, she said.

“Very inside.”, I said. “I don’t even really know what it means.”

“I must get a mop… or a bucket? Not both?”

“He was drunk.”

“Very drunk.”

“Did he use the bucket?”

“It was the start of a very long thread on an Internet message board.”

“…message board?”

“…It’s where people post messages to each other on the Internet.”

At this point, I think she concluded that I was stark raving mad. “I’m… not asking.”

She was probably correct. We walked out to our car.

“It’s like our world just invaded theirs.”

“You shouldn’t have crossed the streams.”

(note: cafepress page is merely because I can’t figure out at this late hour how to pull the image out of it. plz do not order waterthread t-shirts. unless. well, you really want to. in that case I think I make a quarter. shiny. if you don’t know what the Waterthread was, you could possibly check waterthread.org, but I doubt that would help either. I don’t really know what the waterthread was and I hosted the damned thing.)