In case you were wondering ...

... here's the four-in-one that is Everything, described four ways.

5/27/14 - Behind Closed Doors

Find my short horror story, "Freedom," in Behind Closed Doors, a new anthology of dark tales from Thirteen O' Clock Press.

eBook

PoD

5/11/14 - You Asked For It, You Got It ...

So it is with Toyota. So it was with the bug.

The bug greeted me at lunchtime the other day, when I went to the cupboard for a bowl. A black, beetle-ish specimen, the bug was trapped hopelessly at the bottom of the deep bowl, and had been for some time, going by the profusion of tiny feces keeping it company.

I took the little prisoner outside, to be released to the Promised Land of my back deck. As I did so, however, I was nagged by a thought: What is this bug called? I wanted to know, with an undue urgency, all through my encounter with the bug; but, having no way of knowing, I soon forgot about it. And with that, I promptly returned to lunch (using a second, clean bowl).

The answer to my question would arrive the next day.

I keep a word ledger, a book in which I write down notable words and then, later, look them up and record their definitions. Every month or so, I review some of my current word ledger, to reinforce the new words and expand my vocabulary. I say "every month or so," but my reviewing of the ledger is rather erratic and random; usually, it only happens when I have some time to kill, or finish reading a proper book and don't yet want to start a new one.

The day after the mystery bug, I finished reading a proper book and didn't yet want to start a new one. I was overdue for a ledger review, so I went to it.

On one of the first pages of words I reviewed, one jumped out at me: "cockchafer." Why, I didn't know; but it stuck with me, looping through my mind, along with its definition: "any of certain scarab beetles ..."

Scarab beetles. That bug from the bowl certainly did have a scarab-like appearance.

Later that day, I did a Google image search for cockchafer pictures, and sure enough, the black cockchafer was a dead ringer for the bug that had been so conspicuously waiting for me in the bowl the day before.

The bug that I'd had the vague-but-distinct yen to know the name of.

What a coincidence: less than a day after "asking" this question, I seemed to have received an "answer," through a chance string of circumstances and events.

(Anyone who's read my book on the subject of synchronicity will detect my subtle sarcasm in this last statement, since the cockchafer revelation was just the latest in a lineage of such "question-and-answer" incidents, all of which conform to an explicitly consistent pattern.)

4/27/14 - Public Service Announcement

This isn't a synchronicity report. Nor is it to promote new writing. Rather, it's a public service announcement: that the phenomenon known as synchronicity is very, very real.

Not that I wasn't already convinced of this (many times over). It's just that, today, I read a book, There Are No Accidents by Robert H. Hopcke, and it independently reinforced everything I've experienced repeatedly for years now, in no uncertain terms. But, again, this post isn't a synchronicity report, despite the interesting and "random" means by which I came to read Mr. Hopcke's book. Instead, I would just like to remark on the stark similarity between it and the book I myself wrote on the subject (Synchronicity: One Man's Experience). The two describe explicitly similar phenomena, both in nature and in pattern, and even follow similar lines of reasoning in regards to what it all means. And, of course, I wrote my book last year, before ever learning that There Are No Accidents existed.

But that's all just coincidence, right? Because experts have agreed that such fantastic phenomena as synchronicity cannot exist.

Likewise, it was just a coincidence that the two books would cite not only remarkably similar phenomena, but near-exact incidents. The first chapter of my book details how, starting some years ago, I began repeatedly seeing the number 1111 and its variants, eventually in fascinating and highly unlikely ways (and numbering in the hundreds, if not thousands). For me, a typical "sighting" would be Just Happening to glance at a clock at 11:11, with a more notable version of this involving complicated logistics (such as driving past an electronic sign at the precise moment it changed to 11:11, or being distracted by a "random" noise and having my attention drawn to an 11:11-displaying clock, etc). As I recounted in my book, the phenomenon matured with my mounting skepticism toward it, until I was encountering 1111 in configurations and frequencies that I couldn't reasonably write off as chance (such as discovering a document on my computer that was created on November 11th, 2011, at 11:11 PM, so that it's time stamp read 11/11/11 11:11 -- with my chance discovery of the document Just Happening to coincide with the peak of the repeat-number phenomenon). Also, there are fun, multidimensional ones such as this email snapshot. Now, I quote from a case report in There Are No Accidents, written years ago by someone I've never met or heard of:

"'The number 11 began to surface after I began dating my ex-girlfriend in late 1992. It was then that she said to me, "I always look at the clock at 11:11" ... I immediately noticed, however, that this number didn't go away with our breakup. There were just too many strange and random encounters with 11 for me to simply label them coincidence ... I once came home in the evening and sat down in front of the TV, only to glance at the VCR which was recording a program, and noticed that it displayed 11:11 P.M. on channel 11 with the recording time being 11:11:11.'"

But, I repeat: all coincidence. Just like there are, in fact, accidents, apparently there are coincidences, too, including really, really, really-really-really unlikely ones.

Okay, enough with the sarcasm. The point of this post: yes, synchronicity is real, and I have been systematically stripped of any luxury of denying that fact.

End public service announcement.

4/7/14 - Repeat Numbers, Again

I am sought out by certain numbers, it seems, often in novel ways that leave me equal parts tickled and intrigued. I've written of this phenomenon both on this blog and in a book I wrote on the subject, Synchronicity: One Man's Experience. Today, however, I experienced a particularly extraordinary number-repetition.

It started yesterday, with my trusty timer.

The timer is nothing special, just a standard digital hour-timer, of the kind used to time pot roasts and casseroles the world over. But I've developed a special affinity for my timer, for no particular reason, the way we do anything we use regularly. What do I use this timer for? That's complicated, and immaterial to the subject at hand, so I'll just say that I use it daily. In this regard, yesterday was no different, except for one thing: once my timer went off, I didn't turn off its alarm. I was out of the room at the time, and I'd remembered the timed event on my own, so I just let the timer beep. I knew it would stop after a minute, and it did, so that I totally forgot about the timer -- until today, when I went to use it anew.

Of all the times I've employed my timer, this was the first I'd neglected to reset it afterward. Thankfully, it didn't mind.

One interesting thing about my timer: for some reason, it counts in reverse after going off, and will continue to do so until reset. Well, since I hadn't reset my timer, it continued counting all through yesterday afternoon and last night, as if patiently awaiting my return. As it so happened, the timer waited in this fashion for exactly seventeen hours, thirty-seven minutes, and thirty-seven seconds, hitting that thirty-seventh second at the precise moment I picked it up and looked at it this afternoon. Then, the digital display read 17:37:37.

One of the numbers I repeatedly see is 37, 1137, and variants of these (73, 137, 173, etc). In fact, in the last few weeks, these have been the most prominent repetitions, repeatedly coming to me in ways which defy reasonable chance, and psychological explanations such as selective perception and subconscious fixation.

Not only did I just happened to pick up the timer when it displayed two of "my" numbers by way of the hour- and minute columns, but I picked it up to the second for it to display a third. Quite a trick.

I stood holding the timer for some time after, searching for any possible explanation. But I came up empty. I hadn't so much as gone near that timer all day, so there was no way I could've known what it had ticked to; until I went in the room and fetched the timer, I'd been at the other side of the house, and the timer was turned away from me as I approached.

It bears mentioning that, after seeing 37 and its variants so much lately (and in ways and configurations nearly as unlikely and striking as that of the timer), I had become somewhat jaded to the repetitions, so that they'd lost their wow and I'd begun ignoring them, for all the mystery they represented -- a sensory-overload of sorts. This is significant because it has happened several times in the past, and every time it does, the numbers will begin repeating in different, more coherent ways, as to regain my attention -- and, usually, to inspire more blog posts such as this one. So, not only was the event significantly unlikely in itself, but it conformed with a pattern repeated again and again over years of fundamentally identical incidents.

Seeing such a pattern, a detective would say that the incident "fits the profile." I'm inclined to agree.

3/29/14 - The Stray Branch

Find my literary short-short, "Our Heroes Suck," in the latest issue of The Stray Branch, hot off the "presses."

Link

3/24 - Surprise, Surprise

A couple days ago, I experienced a classic "recurrence," which is how I refer to your typical, run-of-the-mill incidence of synchronicity. However, I didn't pay much attention to this particular recurrence, because the time gap between the two recurring events was nearly a week, instead of hours or days (or seconds, or simultaneous, like so many are).

My log entry for the recurrence in question:

"3/22/14

A minor recurrence, quite possibly a coincidence. Sometime in the last week, I can't remember just when or where (it was in a book), I read a traveling tip on how you should tag your luggage with something distinctive so you can pick it out from a baggage carousel, etc. Then today, I got an unexpected package in the mail from a friend, in which was a bright, florid luggage tag, with a note saying that it helps to have distinctive tagging on your bags so you can pick them out, etc. Definitely a recurrence, but the time window is large enough that it isn't too notable."

An interesting event, certainly, considering the express exactness of the theme of "distinguish your luggage so it can be recognized," right down the same terms and wording. But it's not outside the realm of chance to encounter it twice within a week, because, for all the valid synchronicities out there, chance coincidence does, in fact, occur.

When I shared this recurrence with my friend, however, her response lent a new dimension to the incident:

"Since I wrote the letter and put the package together a week prior to mailing it, I would guess it was more of a synchronicity [than] you think."

I laughed.