Laughter is a social event. When someone is laughing we want to laugh too. Laugh and the world laughs with you, as they say. I turned without thinking to see what was so funny.

 Of course, I couldn’t tell because she was inside her own bubble. She was wearing headphones and staring at the small television screen mounted on the treadmill, striding in one of those Monty Python power walks, going nowhere fast and staring at the miniature people on the screen.

 The first time it happened was in a coffee shop at the condiment counter. I was stirring my caramel non-fat latte and getting ready to lick the foam from the wooden stick when the woman beside me suddenly began talking. She spoke in a conversational tone except there was no one there but herself. I assumed for a moment she was like the people we pass on the street engaged in animated conversations not exactly with themselves but with ghosts, imaginary companions or antagonists inside the bubble of their heads. Then I saw the spongy ears of the barely noticeable headset and the tiny mic that indicated she was having a telephone conversation.

 I like to look at the eyes now of people inside those bubbles and see where they’re fixed. In the case of the coffee shop conversation, they were aimed at a point about half way to the vanishing point. I am sure some social scientist is writing a thesis even as we speak – excuse me, even as I type – about the reconstruction of the ratios of social space we inhabit as a result of these bubbles. I know people are saying how irritating it is when someone in a restaurant speaks too loudly on their cell phone because the edges of the social space presumed to be part of our table have been broken and allow that intrusive conversation to cross the line.

 I found myself wondering how different it was, really, having one of those electronically enhanced conversations and carrying on with people who aren’t there. The blurred margins of the two kinds of experience make a cellphone conversation next to us feel strange because we thought that proximity meant we inhabited the same social space. It’s like we’re still living on a two-dimensional grid which is suddenly intersected by a portal or node in the abstract four-dimensional spacetime of electronic communication.

 Maybe the difference is that someone out there in televisionland as we used to call cyberspace or in a wireless conversation is creating a virtual world self-consciously whereas the ranter is caught in a loop like a stuck record.

 But I don’t know about that. I often compose things I am writing or practice speeches in my head as I walk in my quiet neighborhood and I find myself gesturing, saying words aloud like someone in headphones singing along. I lose myself in the process and am pulled abruptly from that “rain man space” when I realize that someone is looking at me the way I looked at the crazy lady on the treadmill. I am not really talking to myself but to an audience I am recreating virtually, the one I imagine out there, as I am in this moment as I write. On radio programs I do that too, sitting in a studio with only a producer or in my office doing an interview over the telephone; I imagine a listener and speak to them directly.

 Appearances can be deceiving. Back in my preaching days, I recall getting ready for an early church service when a church member whispered conspiratorially that someone had come in that I hadn’t met. “You need to connect with her,” she said. “She’s incredibly rich and often gives large gifts to projects that catch her attention.”

 I went out to see who she meant. There was a new couple and a new single.  The couple were well dressed and greeted me with warm smiles. The solo wore a stained sweatshirt, her dirty hair went in all directions,. and she looked around with a distracted rhythm that made it difficult to connect. You know, of course, that I guessed wrong, that the one who looked like a wandering homeless was in fact the one who was filthy rich. I realized then that the only difference between a street person and an eccentric was a trust fund.

 Insanity like wisdom is contextual. Someone said that the difference between a hallucination and a vision is that no one shares the hallucination. So what then is this dialogue between us, a portal in a new kind of spacetime or a closed loop back into myself? If our hallucination is consensual, as Gibson defined cyberspace, where is the emphasis, on the hallucination or the fact that it is consensual? Communities, societies and I guess planetary civilizations can all go crazy but no one knows it inside the bubble unless someone external to the madness says so. Maybe everything is inside a bubble, one we create by pretending to have a conversation. Or maybe the boundaries between us don’t really exist except as abstractions like broken lines indicating states on a map. Maybe we’re all cells in a single brain having a single dream, maybe the entire universe is like that, the universe itself becoming conscious through the various apertures which we call evolving organisms, each finding itself looking at the rest in a different way and trying to say what they think they see. Maybe the universe is just a crazy lady on a treadmill, going nowhere fast in a wild Monty Python walk, having one hell of a good time, laughing like a madman.