Like the story of Binny the Albino Squirrel, I have a hard time saying how much of a ‘synchronicity’ any of this is, but nonetheless feel compelled to include it. To the extent there is anything magical in this world, I feel that the comings and goings of the beloved animals in our lives fit the bill …

One spring – I think it was around 2001 – a skinny, shaking stray dog came limping down the sidewalk in front of my house. It was black, with its ribs clearly visible, eyes bulging slightly, and its tail hidden between its legs … Kari was a roommate at my house then, and she was the one who met her:

“I was on my merry way, roller skating to my second shift @ Bonkers (the gas station job I got at the newly named station on cedar and …..46th?) and I saw a dog briskly ambling up the your sidewalk towards the house. I asked her what the deal was and put her in the back yard (since she had no tags). I ran in the house quick and told Joe W (who I was sharing the big bedroom with) that there was a dog in the back yard and I would deal with her when I got done with work …”

It was obvious that someone had beaten the stray badly – she limped so horribly I thought her hips were deformed at first, and she ran and hid, shaking, whenever someone lifted a hand (like when I tried to play with her by throwing a ball).

Although she was terrified of men, she instantly made an exception for me – not only wasn’t she afraid of me, she would climb up into my lap whenever I sat down in a lawnchair, and follow me like a shadow as I moved around the fenced-in yard.

But she wasn’t housebroken, I was gone a lot, and I had a psychotic cat – so adopting her myself was not an option.

She was already so traumatized that I couldn’t bear the thought of sending her to the pound to be further terrified (and potentially euthanized), so it fell to me to find her a home.  While we hunted, I made her a bed in the garage and left the side door open, so that she could come and go between the garage to the yard.

It was great news when my friend Maria agreed to adopt the stray, as soon as she ironed out a couple of preparations. But a day or two turned into a week or two and she never got back to me, and I couldn’t get ahold of her.

And by the time Maria finally let me know she couldn’t adopt her after all, it was too late.

First of all, as I mentioned, the dog had fallen in love with me. And it is a colder heart than mine that does not respond to the unwavering trust and unconditional love that only a dog seems capable of. I have always loved dogs, and this one had decided that I was her human.

When I came home from work, she would hear me coming, and wait at the chain link gate between the house and the garage – as I came into sight, her tail would come up from between her legs and swoop back and forth, in big loopy circles. The happy tail brought a huge smile to my heart, and I knew I was smitten … but still I strove to find her a home somewhere.

The finishing blow came when I was riding the 5 bus home from work one day. I was thinking about how the dog was going to start up that big loopy wag when I got home, when I suddenly knew what her name was: Cleo – short for Cleopatra. I was taken by surprise, since all the names I’d been idly toying since she’d showed up were “cool” names, of the type that you’d expect from a young punk rocker.

I knew then that I could not give her away – I had named her, and now she was mine …  and I was just going to have to find a way to work out all the details that had made keeping her impossible.

And even though this was years before I developed any kind of mystical consciousness or was at all comfortable with spiritual thoughts, let alone with notions about things “happening for a reason,” I nonetheless unquestioningly accepted my intuition that Cleo had come into my life to help teach me about love.

– – – – –

The Cleo coincidence I’m leading up to has to do with my mom. A little context:

When I adopted Cleo I had to find a home for my cat, Elvira – so she went to live with my mom, and has been a great comfort to her over the last several years – as it turns out, Elvira tolerates only two people on this earth – me, and my mother. All others are subject to random attack by wicked tooth and claw.

And after I decided to keep Cleo, and brought her to be spayed, I found out I was too late – Kari’s pitbull, Bruiser, had managed to knock her up, despite our best efforts to keep them apart. She had eight puppies, only three of which survived the first day – she was too young, still too malnourished – and was not producing milk. The three survivors went to live with my mom and dad (pre divorce) to be bottle-raised on goatsmilk.

Two made it to adulthood – one,  “Zorro,” was my sister’s dog until she realized she did not have the time to raise him properly, and so he joined Elvira in living at my mom’s house, where his unquenchable joy for life lit up life for her until lymphatic cancer claimed him a few years ago.

Oh, and aside from Cleo, there has been just one other animal that just arrived at my house and adopted me – an old cat with markings like Elvira’s – which my mom adopted from us and gave a wonderful life for the few weeks she had left (the poor kitty had tumors encircling her heart, as it turned out.)

Anyway, that’s all just to say – my mom and I seem to have a strong connection through animals.

– – – – –

It wasn’t until after the teapots that I ever thought about Cleo as a meaningful coincidence – how she just happened to come walking down the street to my house, from god knows where, into my life, right when I needed her.

Which is wonderful in itself – but the more specific coincidence is how similar Cleo is to my mom’s dog, Jacques (pronounced “jhock” – not to be confused with my friend Jacque, pronounced “Jackie”).

Cleo & Jacques

Since I used to automatically rule out all coincidences as “mere,” back in the pre-teapots days, I never spared a second thought to how odd is was that Cleo has almost identical markings as my mom’s dog Jacques – and more coincidentally – she also has the same rare double dewclaws on her back feet – not just one vestigal thumb, but two per foot.

(And I in no way selected Cleo due to her similarities to Jacques – from Kari finding her in front of my house, to her choosing me as her trusted human, to Maria saying she was going to adopt her just long enough for me to bond irretrievably with her, I’d had little choice in the matter. )

Cleo's double dewclaws (only one set is easily visible here, but there are two per foot)

Jacques' double dewclaws

In most dogs, double dewclaws are an unusual trait – although Jacques is a Beauceron – an uncommon French dog that is one of three breeds that features double dewclaws as standard. (My mom still thinks Cleo is part Beauceron due to her dewclaws, markings, and undercoat, but I think she’s a Labrador/Rottweiler mix.)

The similar appearance of my dog and my mom’s dog may or may not strike you as a significant coincidence, but it was undoubtedly a meaningful coincidence.

For when I recognized that our dogs were so much alike, sharing even the same odd mutated double thumbs, it suddenly opened my eyes to how alike my mom and I are – that we are “teapots” in many ways, ourselves.

This realization might have been obvious to those who know me, but it was one which I had never even come close to seeing in the past, no doubt due to how badly she and I had clashed with one another over the years (as a teenager, I’d considered her my worst enemy, and no doubt she thought the same of me on many occasions.)

And with this insight came an ability to understand and empathize with my mom in ways I never would have thought possible – which in turn, just in time, opened me to being able to help her through divorce, breast & lymphatic cancer, mastectomy, chemotherapy, post surgical psychosis, and financial apocalypse – something that I could never have begun to do before I was brought into empathy by our coincidental canines.

Cleo and Jacques on mom's porch

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Coincidentally, Sunday June 7th was the birthday of:

– my maternal grandmother
– my good friend Jacque
– Jacque’s good friend Rebekah’s father
– Jacque & Rebekah’s good friend Cantew’s 1 year-old baby

I don’t make much of it, but someone who is into astrology might!*

(Although I also don’t totally dismiss the coincidence, which is why I grudgingly added it in here …. it’s pretty hard to completely write off any coincidence these days – and of course Jacque was with me during my mystical experience in California, Rebekah was there for the teapots and dominos, my grandmother sent me the Little Prince book …. no coincidences with Cantew or her baby. Yet anyway! lol)

* edit: it turns out this is also the birthday of Trish MacGregor – who is working on a book about synchronicity that may include some of my stories in it – and who is a professional astrologer. I had no idea that it was her birthday when I threw in the line about “someone who is into astrology.” Figures, doesn’t it?

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Last week, my friend and fellow urban explorer ‘Slim Jim’ called me up, extremely excited by an amazing coincidence he’d just experienced. Like many of us who experience synchronicity, he felt compelled to share it, shout it from the rooftops – and he really wanted me to share it with the world on my blog or on the Action Squad website.

So here’s the story of how another ‘synchro-skeptic’ was blasted by a coincidence that seemed ‘more than mere’  ….

I am atheist, and I firmly and confidently do not believe in anything supernatural.

But I had a couple events happen to me six hours apart that were far too coincidental to be true, given the nature of the events.–

This past week (May ’09), some friends and I went down to Memphis to camp and play games in a large, amazing abandoned building.

The morning we were going to leave, I had a vivid dream about snakes.  In the dream, I was sitting in the middle of the woods.  I’m not sure why I was there.  Dreams often don’t make sense.  There may not have been a reason.  Right next to me was a pile of dead branches.  After a while, several snakes came out of the underbrush without warning and slithered around me really fast.  They were so close to me that they almost touched me.  The snakes were about three feet long and an inch in diameter, not particularly large but not particularly small.  Up until that day, I knew very little about snakes, and I basically assumed that most snakes were poisonous.  The fact that the snakes were so close to me and I thought they could kill me with one bite scared me to the point that I sat up in bed and was jolted awake.  They also were slithering so fast that I didn’t think I could outrun them, particularly when trying to run through the underbrush, which  added to the scare.

I rarely have really scary dreams, and I can’t remember the last time that I was awakened by a bad dream.  It almost never happens.  And I’m sure this is the first time I’ve ever sat up in bed as I’m waking up from a bad dream.  I was really scared.  And snakes, of all things!  Rationally, I never really consider wildlife a threat, because it’s very rare to hear of someone getting killed or seriously injured by a wild animal.  And I’m no more interested in snakes nor scared of snakes than the average person.  This is quite possibly the first time I’ve ever had a dream about snakes.

After realizing that I was sleeping in an abandoned building, in an urban area, a very unlikely place to see snakes, I shrugged off the dream, relaxed, and tried to get back to sleep.  I wasn’t able to get back to sleep, which isn’t unusual – I have sleeping problems.  Shortly thereafter, Mario and I got up and left town.  Our plan was to instead visit a rural wooded area at the southern tip of Illinois which has many underground silica mines.  I had explored some of them in years past, but recently found out where a couple more were that I was previously unaware of.

Our first goal was the Rhymer Mine.  We first tried to access the mine from the road where the road intersects the valley that the mine is located on, called You-Be Hollow.  There was, however, a no trespassing sign at the entrance to the valley, and since there was a house nearby and we didn’t want to get caught trespassing, we parked about half a mile down the road close to some state forest land signs, clearly state forest land.  The region was about half state forest land, half private land, but there was no way of telling from the map which was which.

[googlemaps http://maps.google.com/maps?t=k&ie=UTF8&ll=37.317547,-89.297132&spn=0.023891,0.038624&z=14&output=embed&w=450&h=350]

From the road, we hiked across a long field, which had so much poison ivy that it was impossible to walk without brushing against and stepping on poison ivy pretty much constantly …  This area has the worst case of poison ivy that I’ve ever seen, and I’ve wandered through woods all over the country.

…

We followed the top of the ridge straight to the Rhymer Mine.  Our trek was uneventful, except for the poison ivy that was everywhere we stepped.  We found the mine right away – we found ourselves on top of a semicircular cliff with a row of mine entrances at the bottom of it.  After a satisfying exploration of the mine, we set off on the mile-long trek through the woods back to the car.

 

Rhymer Mine entrance

A short distance farther, we were walking along at a brisk pace, trying to get back to the car as quickly as possible so we could catch up with the rest of the group as they arrived in the Chicago/Milwaukee area.  I wasn’t really paying attention to where I was stepping.

Soon I heard a buzzing noise that sounded like an animal, but I neither knew nor cared what it was.  I was too intent on moving quickly to want to figure it out.

I was moving so quickly that I didn’t notice the enormous rattlesnake coiled up in the middle of the ridge until I was no more than five feet from it!  This guy was huge!  It was curled up in a circle about two feet in diameter.  It must have been at least ten feet long.  The snake itself was about 5-6 inches in diameter.  Colored yellow and greenish.

I panicked.  Instantly.

I think it’s been years since I’ve panicked this badly.  My first thought was that it was so huge that it would squeeze me to death.  My second thought was that I had no idea how poisonous this snake was, but being ignorant on snakes, I thought it was quite possible that its poison would kill me very quickly.  And, knowing that rattlesnakes are dangerous, I assumed that it would have a strong desire to chase me down and bite or squeeze me to death.

Mario was right behind me.  I yelled at him, “Shit!  Shit!  There’s an enormous snake right there!  Run!  Go!  Go!!  Go!!!”

I ran as fast as I could back the way we came.  Mario looked at me bewildered.  I continued to gesture at him to run away as quickly as he could, but he didn’t seem to care.  Eventually, Mario followed me, but at a much slower pace.  I assumed a snake could outrun me, so I took off within a second after spotting it, so that I had the longest head start I could get before it would decide to slither after me.

Keep in mind that I have never encountered a large snake in the wild before.  I spent my childhood roaming the woods, and I regularly wander through the woods all over the country, mostly geocaching, sometimes hiking, and sometimes scouting underground mines.  I knew there were snakes in the south, and yes we were at the southern tip of Illinois, which is relatively far south, but I thought you’d have to go down to Louisiana or Mississippi or Alabama to see dangerous snakes.  The woods we were in looked like any generic patch of hilly woods I’ve wandered through all over the Midwest.  It looked like the woods I grew up wandering through in Iowa.  I would never expect to see a large snake in generic Midwestern woods, and even after being startled awake by snakes in the vivid dream, if I had thought about it, I would’ve written it off as an irrational fear from a dream and I would’ve never imagined that I would encounter a large rattlesnake that  same day.

And I’m fairly certain this is the largest snake I’ve ever seen in my life.  I’ve seen a few snakes at the zoo, but none of them were as large as this rattler.  I had only seen snakes in the wild on a few occasions, and the longest was about three feet long and an inch in diameter, about the same size as the snakes in my dream.  This makes it even harder to believe that I stumbled upon this giant only a few hours after waking up from a dream about snakes.

…

This hike back to the car was like an obstacle course, changing direction multiple times to avoid tractors, people, turkeys that we thought were people, lakes, and, most notably, snakes.  I hike off-trail in the woods quite regularly, often sneaking around on private land, and I’ve never experienced anything this weird before.

My 29th birthday is today.  I’m getting old.  But this is the first time I’ve ever sat up in bed as I woke up from a bad dream, and I can’t remember the last time I woke up because of a bad dream.  It’s very rare.  I’ve also never seen a large snake in the wild before.  The dream happening by itself would not be noteworthy.  Seeing the huge snake in the wild was pretty shocking, and is a rare occurrence, but it does happen.  But what are the odds of sitting up in my sleep from a dream about snakes and no more than six hours later finding myself five feet from a huge rattlesnake in real life?  Unbelievable.  Part of my brain refuses to believe it really happened.  One remarkable occurrence of synchronicity isn’t quite enough to make me believe in the supernatural – I’m inclined to chalk it up to one crazy coincidence – but it does get me thinking about it.

I knew Max Action was interested in synchronicity and had had several surprising and unbelievable events happen to him.  As we drove back, I called Max to tell him about my amazing incident and see if he might be willing to post it on the Action Squad site or on his blog.  Believe it or not, at the moment I called, he was working on his synchronicity blog.

–Slim Jim

The next day, as I was explaining the details of Jim's story to my girlfriend Becky, she laughed and asked me if I'd seen Natalie Dee's 'comic of the day' (which she's a huge fan of)

I have no reason to doubt that the snake Jim saw was indeed massive – even though it would be larger than any timber rattler known, if his estimate of its size is even close to accurate – he’s a very sober engineer type, and if his first thought was that the snake was going to actually squeeze him to death, it HAD to be huge!

I wish I could remember my dreams … from Carl Jung to Slim Jim, people have amazing coincidences with their dreams – but since I never remember mine, any such synchronicities are doomed to be unnoticed and forgotten. Good thing I have plenty of waking ones, I guess!

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I love post apocalyptic wasteland warrior movies.

I’ve been trying to get a website about them off the ground for over seven years now, but it never really makes it to life – I tend to get manic and watch tons of them and scribble tons of notes in a short period of time … and then be so burned out on it all that I can’t even dream of writing about or building a site on the subject.

my post apocalyptic wasteland warrior movie collection

I did finally get most of them transferred from VHS into digital format the interest-surge before last, and since then have posted some film clips on Youtube. The first simple video I ever uploaded to Youtube was a random clip from the movie “Dune Warriors,” a post-apocalyptic wasteland warrior retelling of Seven Samurai / The Magnificent Seven.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JpeaHlCRcuU]

Yesterday I opened this day-old email I’d received in my Youtube account:

Subject: Dune Warriors…

Howdy, where did you get the footage from Dune Warriors, I’m in that movie.

Check out the first guy that gets shot, the fellow that says theres “water in Chinlee”

Cheers,

Mark

I couldn’t recall off the top of my head which movie Dune Warriors was (I always mix it up with the Lou Ferrigno crapfest “Desert Warrior”), so I pulled it up and watched a the opening scene he described, which starts immediately after the clip above ended …

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F5zZhhhETa8]

I was amused but didn’t write him back – I’m dormant on the wasteland warrior project now, and didn’t find the motivation.

But today , unexpectedly,- I did write him back – after I heard the news that David Carradine had just been found dead in a Bangkok hotel – because, well, here’s – see for yourself – this is where that clip above left off:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cr16bDgFUbc]

Subject: Re: Dune Warriors…

Awesome! I have it on VHS, have been collecting old wasteland warrior movies for years … Dune Warriors is a fun one. Sucks to hear about David Carradine … loved him in DeathRace 2000 and the like. I hope he died having fun in that Bangkok hotel!

The news hadn’t even hinted that there was anything sexual about his death at that point, but something about “Bangkok hotel room” just made it seem likely. And of course, later that afternoon, I found out that David had, indeed, “died having fun” – in an auto-erotic asphyxiation accident.

But before that news broke, Mark wrote me back:

Subject: Re: Dune Warriors…

That’s weird, I just got breaking news that David’s dead, just as you wrote me.

I’m in the Philippines still now, so it must have happened this afternoon.

Coincidence, eh?

–

I broke out laughing – everywhere I turn lately I am surrounded by coincidences and people talking about them, unprompted, from all areas of my life …

hell, on another post-apocalyptic note, just yesterday evening, after taking a break from writing on this blog, I was reading a collection of Harlan Ellison short stories – a massive collection, over 1200 pages.

I’d bought it months and months ago, to get the story “A Boy and his Dog” – a post-apocalyptic tale that had later been turned into a wasteland warrior movie, several years before ‘Mad Max’ stormed the world.

I realized soon enough, reading through the rest of the book, that for the most part,  I didn’t really like Ellison’s stories very much. They were well-crafted and easy to keep reading … but they left a bad aftertaste – it seems like he was an angry and bitter man for much of his life, and most of his stories reflect this. And like a grease, it comes off on your brain when you read hundreds of pages of his often-autobiographical tales.

But for some reason I kept reading the giant tome, although I complained about it more than once to my girlfriend, and I’d put the book aside many months ago, only recently picking it up again after finding it under the bed, bookmark still midway through its impressive girth.

The bleak tales were certainly an odd counterpoint to the mystically-inclined mindset I sought to cultivate, dwelling on synchronicity and mystical consciousness while writing this blog.

But like “Dune Warriors,” which I would never have thought would be a pathway to synchronicity, so did ‘The Essential Ellison’ bring it all back to “coincidence,” when I turned the page and was greeted by this:

synchronicity everywhere

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April 25th 2007

I was out breaking in the camshaft on my newly-resurrected Buick with a friend, just driving around town aimlessly, talking and listening to music. Suddenly I decided I would call our friend Joe, who I hadn’t seen in a month or two – thinking maybe he’d want to get picked up and come for a cruise.

When I pulled out my cell and dialed him, he answered the phone saying “am I behind you?!”

“What?’

“Are you ahead of us?”

It turned out that he’d just pulled up behind us, with his girlfriend/my friend Megan. Just as she asked him if the car ahead of them was mine (it’s pretty distinctive looking), his phone rang, and, of course, when he answered it was me on the phone.

the Buick boattail

It was impossible to write it off as a coincidence – nor could I find a way to believe I had somehow seen him coming and been prompted, since they didn’t even pull up behind me until I’d already dialed him.

We’re in a good sized metro area, both of us across town from our homes (they were on the way to a coffee shop, and I was just randoming around trying to put miles on the new camshaft). My car – a boattail Buick Riviera- has a curved, low-visibility rear window – but it didn’t matter anyway since it was fully dark at the time, so all I could have seen of them was approaching headlights. And the clincher: since I’d last seen them, Megan had bought a new car – so there was no way that I could have unconsciously recognized their vehicle, either.

So … psychic event, or synchronicty … or is there any difference?

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I was just outside at my job, killing some time waiting for our internet connection to get fixed. My friends Jake and Jacque stopped by to pick up some print outs I had for them (images for Jake’s forthcoming Ouruboros tattoo).

We chatted about some stuff, and the topic of synchronicity came up. Jake pointed out that when you think about it, have it in mind, it seems to make it happen more often. Then they left and Workman and I came back inside, where the net was still down.

So I walked down to a coworkers office – she was just wrapping up a phone call as I approached. For some reason I found myself singsonging her first and middle name – “Keeelly Suuue” – and she looked at me strangely as I walked through the door.

“Did you hear us talking?” she asked.

“Huh?”

Turned out that while I’d been out back (far out of any potential earshot), her and her friend had been talking about her country-bumpkin sounding middle name. I don’t think I’ve ever called her by it before, and I didn’t even really know I knew it until I heard myself saying it.

Good times!

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April 14 2007

I was doing some spring cleaning in the yard one Saturday. and decided I needed some more cool rocks – so I rounded up a couple of friends and went rock hunting. I knew of a good place for this, thanks to Binny the albino squirrel.

Earlier that spring, after she was buried, I’d made her a headstone from a gorgeous piece of quartz from a Wisconsin cow pasture.

However, within a week someone had stolen it. Upset by this desecration, I’d set out on a random quest to find a new one that was worthy yet not so tempting to thieves – something more subtly beautiful, but still white, like Binny had been. That intuition-based quest had led me onto some highways, and eventually to Hastings, where we serendipitously randomed into a mostly unused rock quarry – and the perfect grave marker stone.

So when the urge for rocks struck later the following spring, I returned to the quarry with Becky, Mel and her young son Robbie.

After our rock-picking extravaganza was complete, I decided to bring the crew over to the “Hastings waterfall” (aka Vermillion Falls) – one of my favorite local places – a kick ass combination of rust & stone ruins, active industry, and nature.

I (Heart) Vermillion Falls (Nov '97)

As we arrived, I saw a couple in black clothing walking hand in hand toward the falls, and I reminisced for a bit about trips to the falls with girlfriends in the past  (I’d been coming to them since I was a teenager).

We ran around in the grass of the adjacent park for awhile with Robbie, and then walked toward the falls.

When we were almost there, some guy’s voice said my name. I looked over to see someone I didn’t really recognize – then he introduced himself as “Wackodood” – the screen name of a local explorer who I’d been PMing with recently (about my multiple sclerosis diagnosis), but hadn’t actually met. He’d come with his girlfriend.

The coincidence felt pretty unusual, especially since the topic of synchronicity was being discussed on the urban exploration messageboard we talked on.

“Teapots,” I said, laughing.

That was weird, but then it got weirder – when, as a group, we continued walking toward the falls, and ran into the couple in black I’d noticed earlier … and we discovered that they were Gatsby and Shawna, another couple active on the same little explorer forum.

Three separate groups of explorers from Minneapolis, all simultaneously converged upon the same distant waterfall at the same time – and we were the only people there.

Sometimes you just have to laugh … so we did, and then Gatsby and I crossed the river behind the waterfall and snuck into the ruins of the old tailrace tunnel … lacking a light, we didn’t get very far, but it was a good time.

(And I still have a mossy, fossil-encrusted rock from the waterfall’s mists that day, which I’ve kept alive with a mister bottle and a glass cover ever since.)

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April 2007

I was single, and dating.

This is always a tricky time, dealing with human hearts in a lawless grey zone, where no rules exist but those we hold ourselves to.

Well, that might be a bit dramatic, but you know what I mean.

I found myself in a situation I was increasingly uncomfortable with, seeing two women too regularly for it to be casual – while I wasn’t violating any rules, any promises, any stated expectations – I was nonetheless old enough to take some accountability for my responsibility to do no harm to those I lived alongside.  And deep down, I knew that I wasn’t really doing anyone right.

So when Becky – one of the two women I was dating – told me that she had done a tarot reading in which I had come up as the reversed King of Cups, I knew it was time to examine the situation and myself.

–

Always the skeptic, I found myself doubting that Becky had really even drawn that card for me … maybe she was just obliquely telling me that she knew? It was just too accurate … and I’d never had anything but scorn for tarot card readings and other forms of divination.

But it didn’t really matter, because regardless, it made me realize that I should be striving to date ethically, the same way I was increasingly striving to live in other areas of my life – if I was going to eat more humanely, I should also be living more in line with my spiritual inklings in all domains. To be a rogue and justify any damages done as “not my responsibility, I didn’t lie” had worked fine for me in the past, but it wasn’t going to fly with the transformed Self that I was busy creating.

—–

Although I had long been the harshest of skeptics about the tarot, now, in the post-teapot swirl of synchronicity, the way I was starting to see reality had room for all kinds of interconnectedness between mind and matter, external and internal realities. I was  sometimes even open to the idea that the universe itself was living, aware, and communicative. And in such a universe, tarot cards were a meaning-laden context into which synchronicity could very well flourish.

So later that evening, when I found myself feeling simultaneously utterly mystical and utterly upset about my dating situation, I decided I would try using tarot cards for the first time.

I took out the Waite-Rider deck that had somehow made its home in my sunroom and paced through my house, shuffling the cards and holding Becky in my mind, succeeding at this mental focusing in a way I am rarely able to do, aided by photos she’d taken, items we’d found together, memories of significant events.

After a couple minutes of this, I thought “WHAT AM I TO BECKY?” and laid three cards down face down, in a simple three card spread that Becky had taught me.

The first card would represent the Past answer to my question – “what WAS I to Becky?”

I flipped it over and it was quite accurate:

Very accurate, and the waters of life resonated with me as being similar to Lake Superior, which had been very bound up in our early relationship (we went there together the day after we met, and had returned there several times).

But it was the second card that floored me with synchronicity – the ‘Present’ card – the card answering the question “What am I to Becky now?”

Because the card I flipped over was the same card Becky had gotten for me, in that same position in the spread – and upside down (“Reversed”), the same way she’d drawn it – giving it the meaning “dishonest, double-dealing man; roguery, exaction, vice, scandal, pillage, considerable loss.”

The blood drained from my face – it was the first time I’d ever done tarot cards, and I’d gotten the exact same card that had thrown me into turmoil in the first place, leading me to dabble in tarot. I’d been feeling mystical, in the flow, sure – but this was a little bit much.

Then, numb, I flipped the Future card – “What will I be to Becky?”

After being stunned by the reversed King of Cups, I was extremely sensitive to this card – and it said to me, very clearly, that I was going to have an evil effect on Becky, if I did not change the Present.

In that moment, I had no doubt at all that the cards I got were meaningful, and not random coincidences. And even when I was slightly less certain, later on, I still knew that the message was true – and that a Devil was the last thing I wanted to be in her life.

So I ended our dating relationship shortly afterward. I apologized, and explained the tarot spread I’d gotten. The transition was rough for both of us, but I think we now both agree that it was for the best …

–

—–

Postscript:

Months went by, and eventually it became clear that the respectful ending had come in time to salvage my friendship with Becky (and with the other woman, who I’d also ceased dating).

Becky and I each went through other relationships – after a couple of years,  it became clear that we could try romance again – with an honest and open fresh start.

It’s been since August – and so far, so good …

(and she’s made me aware of several more positive readings of the “Devil” card!)

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A decade or so ago, someone stole my photo albums – my most treasured possession, the one thing I would have made sure to rescue from my house in a fire. At first I hoped it was just a friendly prank, but after calling pretty much everyone I knew to ask them about it, it was clear that something more foul was afoot.

Weeks later, just when I was starting to get past it, a few of the missing albums were mailed back to me via FedEx – but two of them were never returned.

Needless to say, this caused me no small amount of anguish – my memory is atrocious, and the photos I had were the only connections I had to many wonderful people and times. And I knew that whoever took them had done so KNOWING that they meant so much to me … they had struck to cause maximum emotional damage.

I didn’t have any enemies I could think of – but I did know a few people that I could imagine finding some twisted rationale for the theft.

The main suspect was a girl everyone called “Crazy J” – I knew her well enough to know her mind was more than capable of inventing some justification or motivation for something like this, even while still acting like my friend. But I had no specific reason to think it was her, other than my belief that she was capable of it – and she steadfastly denied any involvement no matter how I asked.

As several years went by, I eventually I gave up on ever getting any answers.

But in late 2006, many years after the albums had vanished, the cold case was broken by coincidence …

I was at the house that Crazy J lived at, the morning after they’d had a huge punk rock house party. The roommates were cleaning up the aftermath, and I sat down on a couch in the living room to stay out of the way. A pile of miscellaneous papers was put on the table in front of me – every stray piece of paper – bills, photos, flyers, artwork – was in the pile, which was several inches thick.

I idly flipped through the pile, looked at a postcard that someone had sent her roommate – and then the next piece in the pile was a photograph, strikingly similar to the image on the postcard:

red, white, black & blue - car-ma happens

No, the photo wasn’t mine – it was a picture taken for the lawyers, after Crazy J had been injured in a car accident, not long after my photo albums had disappeared.

But the shirt she was wearing in the picture WAS mine – it was an old Ramones tour shirt from 1983 that I’d scored at a garage sale – and which had vanished several years ago. I’d also suspected her in this theft, and asked her about it – but she’d denied it.

I showed Crazy J the picture, and she admitted she’d taken the shirt, and given it to a guy she was dating.

Well, it had been years and years ago, and not that big of a deal (the shirt was an awesome artifact & garage sale find, but it hadn’t fit me well) … so I laughed it off. Water under the bridge.

I enjoyed the coincidence of the two similar images though, and asked if I could keep them.

Then, on the way out of her house, I noticed a photo stuck onto the fridge  –  a goofy, kind of unflattering picture of my friend Annie, posing in my living room. I assumed it was a duplicate of one of my photos (back in the days of film, I’d always gotten two sets printed from all my negatives and given away the doubles.)

Crazy J wasn’t friends with Annie – in fact, she’d been irked years ago when I’d dated Annie, saying she couldn’t understand what I saw in her – so I asked if I could have that photo too, and she agreed.

For some odd reason, it wasn’t til days later, seeing the three items together in my house, that all the pieces came together with a decisive click – the picture of Annie wasn’t just a double of my photo – it WAS my photo.

I suddenly, finally, knew – with perfect clarity – Crazy J had stolen my photo albums, the same way she’d stolen my Ramones shirt.

It isn’t rational at all, but I also ‘knew’ that I’d been led to the clues for a reason – and I just couldn’t shake the feeling that the saluting postcard woman was the smiling face of the universe, letting me know who’dunnit.

I was glad to find that I had no anger, no bitterness or negativity left to work through – thanks in large part to the even-more-irrational but equally unshakable notion that her car accident had been “car-ma” for the malicious theft.

Moreso,  I was grateful for the closure that had finally come – which not only solved a long-standing mystery, but let me know that Crazy J was not a person I should ever trust or consider a friend.

Thanks for the tip, Universe!

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Oct 15th, 2006

For a few years, my younger sister lived in Elgin, Illinois. The first time I visited her there, she took me on a tour of the old brick downtown area, where we randomly discovered an alley that I just loved – an organic tangle of odd angles, patchwork brick, vents, old iron fire escapes … even a decaying old Uncle Sam hat way up in a corner.

One Saturday afternoon in October,  Kari and Becky and I decided on a whim to go see my sister for one night-  although we knew that we wouldn’t arrive until almost midnight, and would have to drive home again the next day.

It was a lot of driving, and someone always had to sit in the halfcab backseat thing of Kari’s pickup truck – one of those little fold-down seats, the kind it sucks to sit on.

On Sunday we drove around Elgin and went and looked at some antique stores’ “Closed” signs – and wound up back in the alley I’d liked so much before.

I was feeling really positive, in the flow – the day just felt magical and I was surfing it. You can probably get an idea by my face in the photo below – which was taken maybe a minute before I opened up that big iron hatch at the right (behind the upside-down garbage can) – and found, lying on the dead-end concrete steps within, a swirl of yellow “Police Line – Do Not Cross” tape – surrounding a single crisp $100 bill.

in the flow, about to open the hatch

As you can probably imagine, this felt like some kind of dream – it’s not really that much money I know, but seriously …what the heck? And not just that I found it, but that it seemed to make so much sense that I did, when I did … like I was expecting it somehow. Serendipity, synchronicity … call it what you will, it felt great.

So I bought everyone coffee at the nearby coffee shop, and later that afternoon when we went to a tasty Mexican place (Azteca de Oro) to eat, I picked up the tab … it just seemed right to share that lucky found money with my friends.

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Click to enlarge:

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