“When Reality Wiggled (The Sock Song)” Verse 1 Tuesday, two-forty-seven, in a Midtown kind of haze She’d been selling doom and viruses to men in navy grays Talkin’ ‘bout outbreaks, markets, money shiverin’ in its skin But she’s late for a date with an angel statue and a tourist whim Down where the fountain’s leaking secrets in the park Where the pigeons run the union and the hotdog carts after dark She’s scrollin’ through the currencies, the world about to slide When the air goes all Nintendo-glitch and starts to jelly-ride Pre-Chorus She says, “Either I need coffee or the sky just learned to dance” And every stock on every screen just did a little trance Chorus When reality wiggled at Bethesda Fountain Every square of the air did the quantum mountain You could taste the spreadsheets, smell the foreign exchange Hear a truck-stop sermon on the AM range Two socks humming like a broken halo One said “zero,” one said “minus payload” When the pair finally clicked and the ledgers all giggled The world took a breath And reality wiggled Verse 2 Here comes Mister 000 with a pocket full of math Got a fifty-tab workbook and a mismatched aftermath There’s a gray gym sock with three green stripes and a curse He’s tried to throw it out so many times he’s gone in reverse From the other side she’s walkin’ with subtraction in her shoes Little minus-sign heartbeat, black-sock déjà vu blues Her dress sock’s got a hole where the starlight leaks She calls it North Star Comfort on the loneliest weeks Pre-Chorus The wind turns into graph paper, the squirrels begin to hum And all the atoms line up like, “Well I guess our time has come” Chorus When reality wiggled at Bethesda Fountain Every atom on break came back from countin’ You could see the taste of water, feel the flavor of calm Hear the Dow Jones ringing like a church house psalm Two socks glowing like forbidden laundry Whisperin’ “Hey, you complete me, hon, see?” When cotton met cotton and the cosmos giggled The world hit “Save As” And reality wiggled Bridge Truck-stop AM preacher on a New York dial Says, “Brothers and sisters, hold your socks a while The universe hates an open parenthesis So it sends you a stranger with the missing piece” The chef sees umami in the air like steam The coder watches numbers fall into a dream The markets stop jittering, look over the ledge Then lie flat down like a perfectly balanced hedge Up in some glass tower, an analyst cries ‘Cause the charts made a joke and the math told lies Three-point-seven seconds of impossible grace And every debt, every doubt snapped into place Verse 3 They don’t kiss, they don’t swoon, no orchestral swell Just two weird souls go, “Oh, yeah, that tracks. Well.” “I balance your budgets,” he says, “with a cell and a sigh.” “I stop reality from trippin’ over its own shoelace,” she replies The magnets shut up, the quantum socks purr The street vendors shrug, “Eh, that’s just how Tuesdays were.” The chicken sandwich flickers in a diner light Then decides not to ascend to some sodium heaven tonight Pre-Chorus Somewhere a kid in finance tries to make a slide But PowerPoint don’t do justice to a universe that tried Chorus When reality wiggled at Bethesda Fountain You could hear Wall Street echo off a cosmic mountain Every credit found a debit, every loss found a win Every “where does this go?” found a perfect bin Two socks finally from the same old drawer Say, “We’ve been on layaway at the fabric store” When the pair locked in and the chaos jiggled The books all closed And reality wiggled Outro So if your life’s one lonely, unmatched shoe And your days feel like a cell with no column to glue Stick that ragged little something in your pocket and wait There’s a fountain somewhere messin’ with your fate ‘Cause the world is just a spreadsheet with a sense of fun And the sum of all your heartbreaks still adds to one When your missing half arrives and the edges get smoothed Even Central Park statues start to bust a move At the edge of the map where the weird gets legal You’ll hear a soft chuckle from the cosmic ledger beagle When your story snaps tight and the loose ends are jiggled The universe sings, And reality wiggled.
