Reality, if you think about it, is a kind of social contract. You and I might be strangers, but we agree, at least at a really basic level, on what is real.
So when you talk to someone who isn't signed onto that same contract, it's kind of unsettling.
"What do the gloves do?"
I'm asking a guy named George about the thin plastic hospital gloves he was wearing when we met. "It's so the cosmic dust doesn't get on my hands," is his reply.
I met George at the Citywide Mental Health Center in San Francisco's tenderloin district. It's the type of place where men wearing unseasonable winter parkas loiter around the entrance smoking cigarettes.
[For more of this story, written by Amy Standen, go to http://www.npr.org/blogs/healt...ad-to-new-treatments]
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