alternate ending to the teapot coincidence write-up, from June 27, 2006 – found on old computer harddrive. I had a hard time with this part, stalling on it for months, throwing away attempt after attempt to sum things up.

Aftermath

As a boy, there were many times that I woke up disappointed, finding that I had failed in my attempt to bring something tangible back from some wonderful dream world.

This … teapot experience … it was almost like I’d woken up with a dream artifact clutched in my hands, just as undeniably real as anything else.

Today, the two teapots are found together in my living room – their spouts arcing together, meeting over a green stone from Point Reyes. Day after day, they do not fade away when I wake up.

I have no Theory of Life, Synchronicities, & Everything to preach.

I don’t pretend to have any idea at all HOW these teapots happened.

I don’t invoke ghosts, psychic powers, time travel, angels, or gods in some effort to explain. I don’t claim this was a supernatural event at all.

But I don’t invoke “statistical coincidence,” either. My traditional bias for simple, rational, scientific explanations is of no use here. I don’t think it’s even an option for me – hell, it would be irrational to write it off as ‘random chance,’ as far as I can see.

You don’t need to be a new-ager to see that the reality we’re a part of is staggeringly complex. And I think it’s clear that what we know about reality is dwarfed by all that we do NOT know … not to mention all that we don’t even know that we don’t know!

So really, it should be no surprise to any of us that things that can be categorized only as “Unknowable” should happen all the time.

Yet many people are resistant to this – everything has to be explained, or at the very least explainable, in one way or another.

I say, fuck it.

I embrace the unknowable and I give it a little pelvis just to let it know I’m interested. I am goddamned happy that things I can’t explain are going on all the time, all around me. I’m glad to be aware that even I myself am such an unknown and unknowable thing – that nothing’s really explained, that we really don’t know anything.

But yeah, sure, sometimes it still messes me up – it can be goddamn scary not being able to verify which way is up, what is true, what is good, how to live, what to think. There is no compass that can help. All the systems are self-referential. It’s enough to make a seeker panic.

But then I remember to stop.

Breathe.

And remember.

It’s OK.

I knew it that day on Point Reyes, driving back to the city afterward, glowing and invincible, Devo’s “That’s Good” repeating on the car stereo. But I’ve somehow forgotten it since then, right up until right now writing this. It’s why this update has been so hard to finish over the past several months, as I stalled out on this page – it was like trying to explain one of those elusive dreams that crumble as you merely begin to try to examine them.

For a while the teapots even became just more clutter to me – I could not wrest any meaning or truth or lesson from them, even when I tried.

But I know it right now – that it’s a ‘monumental good thing.’ That there is nothing to worry about – not even the fact that I will inevitably forget this all again and get pulled back into worrying about what is good, what to do, what is true, what can be proved to be trustworthy, what holds some meaning.

I’m OK with forgetting – life would probably be pretty boring if you were enlightened all the time, eh?

But I don’t want to totally forget, either, and go off wandering back into the desert for years. I want to keep this knowing in reach, and return to it as I do the sea, for regular recharging.

And that’s why I’m so glad that I have these teapots now, in my living room where I see them every day.

To remind me.

synchronicity

surf to a random post

subscribe by email

subscribe w/ a reader

April 2006

It was the week before Easter, early to mid afternoon, and I was at Target with Kari and Tory, hanging out while they picked up something. On the way out, we were drawn into the Easter candy aisle. I decided I wanted to buy one thing, but was having trouble choosing what candy to get.

There were chocolate crosses for sale, which I thought was extremely bizarre – either taken as a religious icon or as a torture & execution device, a cross just wasn’t the kind of thing I expected to see cast in chocolate.  But there they were – two versions – one with pink flowers and one with purple.  I picked up the purple-flowered version and showed it to Tory.

But I didn’t buy it.

In fact, in the end of several minutes in the candy aisle, I was unable to choose what to buy – and actually left Target empty handed. That will probably only sound bizarre to those who know me, and know that I have a savage sugar tooth – it was odd that I’d committed to buying some candy, and then failed to do so.

Later that same evening, my friend Megh came over to watch a movie. (Megh had been a member of the atheist group I’d led in college, and I’d first put the teapot tale into words in an email to her. We’d been talking about synchronicity and the weirdness of reality constantly since then.)

Upon entering the house she told me that she had brought something for me.

It was a chocolate crucifix with purple flowers.

And better, it turned out that she’d bought the cross from the very same Target that I’d been at earlier, – it was almost certainly the very same one that I’d picked up and put back on the shelf a few hours before.

(I was unable to not eat the chocolate, so I just saved the box .)

synchronicity

surf to a random post

subscribe by email

subscribe w/ a reader

February 2006

OK, this is the first coincidence I’ve posted about so far that happened “Post Teapots” – just a couple of weeks after, I believe. My friend Rebekah was closely tied to the teapot happenings, since she was the best friend of my girlfriend (Jacque, who was with my in California during my mystical experience) and the girlfriend of my roommate (Mark, who had been the one taking photographs as I found the teapots beneath the stairs). Plus she’d had been there at the thrift store when I’d bought the first teapot.

In the couple of weeks after I found the second one, it seemed like our whole group of friends were immersed in minor coincidences constantly – although sadly I can recall little of the details now (this was well before I decided I wanted to try to remember and even write down coincidences when they occurred).  Thanks to tangible traces it left behind, though, I do remember one instance:

Six of us were sitting around playing Pictionary. During the course of the first two games, it became clear that Rebekah and I, on opposing teams, were both getting very good at cutting to quick abstractions when drawing. Some comments were made about how when she and I were teamed up we’d be unstoppable (we were rotating partners each round and in the final round she and I would be partnered up.)

Shortly into the third game, I was drawing, Rebeckah was guessing, and the word was “dominos.” I hastily sketched a pair of dominos, knowing she’d have to get it very quickly to beat the other teams to the punch. Almost immediately she had a curious reaction – her face flushed bright red and she had a hard time getting the word “dominos” blurted out.

Flushed and flustered, she grabbed the notebook from me and paged backward a few pages – to show us the one thing that she had doodled aimlessly, minutes before – dominos, in two places:

my drawing on the left, her doodles on the right

(the other drawings on the page are from other rounds of pictionary or by other people – the dominos are the only non-directed drawings that she did).

————

Later – maybe that same day, maybe the next day, we went to the thrift store – for the first time since the time I’d bought the teapot.  It was a large store – I think it was the Sun Ray mall one on 94 – and we all got separated.  I wandered alone for what seemed to me a surprising amount of time without seeing any of my friends.

Finally, I looked up and discovered that Rebekah had come down the aisle from the other side. She also had been alone the entire time since we’d arrived, and I was the first of our party she’d run into since. In the spot where we met, we both looked up and saw that there was a plastic bag of dominos hanging in the aisle between us – and burst into laughter.

Our laughter took on a somewhat different tone when the exact same thing happened the next two times we went to thrift stores, over the rest of that winter – wherever she and I met up in the store, there would be dominos right there with us.

synchronicity

surf to a random post

subscribe by email

subscribe w/ a reader

“One would soon go mad if one took these coincidences too seriously – one might be led to suspect that there were all sorts of things going on in the Universe which he did not thoroughly understand.”

– Kurt Vonnegut

synchronicity

surf to a random post

subscribe by email

subscribe w/ a reader

Fall, 2006

In Minnesota, savvy natives don’t look to a groundhog to know when Spring has come – there are more reliable signs that winter is done with its teasing, lingering retreat for good, not to return again til next time.

Last night, I saw one such sign – a platoon of trucks flashing their way down 35W in the middle of the night, a slow-motion herd of mechanical mastadons sweeping away the winter build-up of sand and corrosive road salt. And like a signalman in a semaphore telegraph tower, it was now my duty to take up the cry of “Spring is coming!” and spread the word to all who had not yet heard.

My part in this exalted message’s broadcast is a black 1971 Buick Riviera – for only in Spring do the old great steel beasts emerge out from hibernation, growling and roaring. So, with the pleasure that comes from doing one’s sacred duty, I changed the flat tire, charged the weakened battery, topped off the fluids, cleaned out the trash left behind from the last roadtrip of fall, reinstated my insurance, and hit the highways – not even taking time to wash off the dust – wind and rain would take care of that soon enough, and I had a message to deliver.

–

the Apocalypse & Cleo

–

Anyway, this all prompted me to post another coincidence story:

I bought my car off of Ebay from a guy in downtown Chicago. Becky and I drove my crappy 96 Pontiac out there together.  When the Pontiac broke down on the way back out of Illinois, we ditched it in a hotel parking lot unlocked with the keys and title on the floor and kept moving – no time to deal with the mess; I had a real car to bring home safely. On the way through Wisconsin we stopped by the shop of a mechanic friend of mine, in Sparta.  We got it up on the hoist and checked everything out.

At some point I had a question about how something worked inside the engine, and he showed me the innards of an old rusty engine he’d had lying inside the shop for several years – a  1970 Buick 455 that he’d pulled out of a doomed car on its way to the junkyard. He noted that the engines were completely compatibile – but the ’70 was a better stock engine, with its 10:1 compression (vs my 71’s 8.5:1).

Well, a month or two later and this compatibility was no longer academic in my mind – on the way back from Lake Superior with Becky and Cleo, the car broke down on the highway. On the side of the I-35  holding the bone-dry oil dipstick, my heart imploded and there were, perhaps, tears hidden behind the storms of profanity that erupted from me. Something had failed and the oil had sneakily drained out.  And then the heat from eight thundering cylinders pounding without lubrication essentially welded the cylinders into the block – my car’s engine was toast.

Of course, luckily for me, my one mechanic friend happened to have one complete engine gathering rust and dust in his shop, and that one engine happened to be a v8 455 Buick engine that was not only relatively easy to swap for the original engine, but was actually an upgrade (faster & more powerful – but requires high-octane fuel and never heard about this new-fangled “fuel efficiency” thing).

( I also installed oil pressure and temp gauges, so history could not repeat itself …  I reckon that the universe was probably all out of coincidental Buick engines after this one.)

–

buick heart transplant

–

Without that donor engine and the help from my friend, the cost of repairing the car would have been high enough that I would have had to give up and write the whole experience off as a disaster.

Instead, I got a my Buick running better than ever – perfect oil pressure and temp, in a condition the original engine could never have hoped to attain – able to take Cleo, my friend Jessi, and me down into the deserts of New Mexico and back home again without a problem last spring.

–

predators eyeing New Mexican cattle

synchronicity

surf to a random post

subscribe by email

subscribe w/ a reader

June 14, 1981

My family provided me with one distinct memory of an interesting coincidence.

I was almost 4 years old in June of 1981 when my parents brought me and my 1 year old sister into South Minneapolis to buy a ceiling fan. When we arrived at the store, my sister was asleep so my dad went into the store alone. Probably this is a constructed memory, but it seems that I can actually remember hanging out of the car window in the parking lot’s heat, sitting atop the car door – and then having the sudden compulsion to start banging my toy on the roof of the car.

South Minneapolis - Chicago Ave - June 14th 1981

The banging woke up my sister, of course, and she started to cry – so my mom decided that we should go into the store, since walking soothed the baby. I don’t remember any of the rest, but my folks both remember it well.
My dad writes:

“You saved the family. You woke baby Jessa up so your mom decided to come in to the store. Within five minutes the storm hit and the car was filled inside with bricks and boards and glass from nearby buildings. It was lifted into the air and dropped down again – there was a big pile of debris under the car. All inside would have been badly hurt or worse. There were boards driven through the tires and sides of the car – right through the metal!”

smashed in rear window

We put you kids against an inner wall and then stood over you with our backs facing away from the wall.  We stood there holding you kids against us and the wall the entire time the tornado was raging (not too long )

My mom recalls:

“It was our wedding anniversary, your sister was teething and uncomfortable.  I had no sooner locked the car and went into the lighting store, where your father was finishing ordering our kitchen fan light,  when your Dad’s ears started popping … you were near the large pane glass windows of the storefront.  He grabbed you by the suspenders, and saw bricks flying and a huge tree going by sideways.  All was queerly quiet until in the darkness where we were gathered with other customers some folks started screaming hysterically.  Others were very quiet and soon it was established that no one was missing or hurt.  A child had been separated from the parents.

It was eerie after the storm passed.  There was no siren, no sound, and devastation everywhere.

 

other cars in the devastated parking lot

As we were directed to leave the lighting store and go to the larger Sears building the sirens began going off.  It appeared as though we were walking through a war zone.  The walk seemed endless … I nursed Jessa and you played at my feet.   How I ever produced milk for the baby is beyond me. A good samaritan gave us a ride home.”

our smashed and battered car

The storm that had come right through the parking lot and totaled our family car was the famous Edina / Har Mar Tornado, which struck with no advance alert, injuring 83 people and killing one as it covered 15 miles in 27 minutes – touching down in Edina, roaring past Lake Harriet, and ravishing the Har Mar Mall with its final fury.

synchronicity

surf to a random post

subscribe by email

subscribe w/ a reader

“A lot o’ people don’t realize what’s really goin’ on. They view life as a bunch o’ unconnected incidents an’ things. They don’t realize that there’s this, like, lattice o’ coincidence that lays on top o’ everything. Give you an example; show you what I mean: Suppose you’re thinkin’ about a plate o’ shrimp. Suddenly somebody’ll say, like, “plate,” or “shrimp,” or “plate o’ shrimp” out of the blue. No explanation. No point in lookin’ for one, either. It’s all part of a cosmic unconciousness.”

– Miller, ‘Repo Man’

synchronicity

surf to a random post

subscribe by email

subscribe w/ a reader

April 2004

I asked my friends to help me remember any unlikely coincidences, and was reminded of this one from the Spring of 2004:

One day my girlfriend Jacque set up a 10 gallon fish tank in her room.

I was immediately inspired and decided that it was time I got a tank, since I’d wanted one since I was a kid. I knew nothing about fishkeeping, but we set off for the obscure pet store that Jacque knew of way up in Forest Lake (about 45 minutes north of the Twin Cities). I had an idea I’d get a 20 or 30 gallon tank – but when we got to the store I quickly let the guy upsell me to a huge 75 gallon tank with a natural pine stand.

Unlike me, I did not do any comparison shopping or seek out a used one, even though it was an expensive purchase  – nor did I even think about the cost, really – and I had only a vague idea where it might fit into my small house.

More problematically, I also didn’t think about how the hell I was going to get the tank home – when the employees brought it out back, it was immediately obvious that it would never, ever fit into either the backseat or the trunk of my old Volvo.

However, I didn’t have to worry for more than a moment, because our friends Matt & Mandy coincidentally showed up in his cargo van just in time – at the pet store an hour away from their house.

So the fishtank came home effortlessly (and it fit perfectly in the living room when we arrived).

fish tank in 2004

(note: years later, Jacque was my ex and Matt was Mandy’s, and Mandy moved in with me and the fishtank)

synchronicity

surf to a random post

subscribe by email

subscribe w/ a reader

September 2003

After I started being open to the idea that some coincidences might not be mere statistical flukes, and could be worth examining as potentially significant – or if nothing else, interesting – I wracked my terribly faulty memory to see if I could remember any such weirdness happening in my past.

The first thing I remembered was a relatively recent story, from September of 2003.

A mouse or three had recently come to live in my house, fleeing from the fall’s failing warmth – they’d been boldly scampering around my house, raiding my pantry, pooping on everything, and deftly avoiding the traps I put out as a result of said raiding and pooping (the scampering alone was kind of cute).

One night my friend Jacque and I were hanging out in my living room, surfing the couch through spacetime together. The topic of the mice came up – we might have seen one dart past, I don’t recall , but for whatever reason,  I turned to my dog and said,

“Cleo, if you don’t start catching mice, I’m going to trade you in for a cat.”

About five minutes later, I noticed that Cleo was lying on the floor,  perfectly still, with her paws stretched out before her, her head down between them, her eyes on mine.

A dead mouse was lying on the carpet between her paws.

Cleo in the living room

Jacque and I both just about died laughing, but I didn’t consider it to be evidence of canine English comprehension or synchronicity – I just wrote it off as a statistical aberration. (This was years before the teapots, and I was deeply in a reductionist materialist paradigm.)

True, she’d never caught a mouse before  (or since). But I figured maybe it had fallen in her water bowl  and drowned – then she’d discovered the corpse and brought it in for us to witness – and it was no coincidence that this happened around the same time that we were talking about mice –  both of these events would be correlated with rodent invasion;  only because they happened to occur within moments of one another did they seem remarkable at all.

Now, today, “post-teapots’  …well,  I guess I still probably give that explanation the most weight, since it did not happen to me in any kind of meaningful context – however, catch me in the right mindset and I’ll probably be quite willing to consider the possibility that my dog – perhaps by some nonlingual telepathic connection, was in fact responding to me.

Or that I somehow knew she was about to bring a dead mouse into the room.

Or that she was merely an unknowing pawn or a piece in some unknown connective force’s web of mysterious effects …

…  I guess when you realize that can’t really rule out these kinds of scenarios, yes, you do lose the sweet, unwavering certainty of the strong skeptic or the staunch believer – but you gain a certain richness of perspective, in which an infinite number of  options dance on and on, uncollapsing, never observable and therefore never actualized, never becoming exclusively true.

Which is rather pleasant, in my opinion – as well as more rationally defensible than any given hubris-drenched claim to certainty …

synchronicity

surf to a random post

subscribe by email

subscribe w/ a reader

“If we are alert, with minds and eyes open, we will see meaning in the commonplace; we will see very real purposes in situations which we might otherwise shrug off and call ‘chance’.”

– from a lecture by Roland Bach (father of Richard Bach)

synchronicity

surf to a random post

subscribe by email

subscribe w/ a reader

Occasionally I’d like to share music that I find appropriate and beautiful – here’s the first of em:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B6gSSsCdFeA&hl=en&fs=1]

synchronicity

surf to a random post

subscribe by email

subscribe w/ a reader