6/27/14 - 'The Roots of Coincidence' (aka Double Whammy)

This post, while containing a synchronicity, and concerning a book about synchronicity, is not a synchronicity post. Rather, it's about a certain type of vindication.

It all started with a book.

The original book, as it were, was of my own creation: Synchronicity: One Man's Experience, which I wrote in the fall of 2013. As the title suggests, the book recounts my experiences with the phenomenon known, more or less accurately, as "synchronicity." Ironically, at the time I wrote this book, I was largely unread on the subject; in fact, the only formal reading I'd done was Carl Jung's monumental paper on the phenomenon. I did, however, have several synchronicity books noted for further reading, if and when I got the inkling to research others' experiences.

One such book was The Roots of Coincidence, by Arthur Koestler.

I don't remember where I first read of Koestler or his book, or why it struck me enough to take interest. Somehow, though, I ended up with a bookmark for its Amazon listing. Lazily, I ignored it for some time, and then, when I did finally follow up on the book, I found it to be far more expensive for my tastes (being an older book, out of print and without an eBook version, prices were inflated accordingly). From there, I checked eBay and Amazon from time to time, hoping to snag a reasonably priced copy, but time and again, no such cheap copies were to be had. I bid on an auction once, but lost out to someone with richer blood.

Thus, The Roots of Coincidence stayed a perpetual presence in my file of bookmarked titles -- until last week.

One night, in a moment of idleness, I again noticed the Roots of Coincidence bookmark, and its stubborn refusal to disappear from my list of must-read books. So I made another halfhearted browse -- and this time, lo and behold, turned up a low-priced copy on eBay. I snatched it up at once, then at last deleted the bookmark, feeling to be crossing off some difficult station from a bucket list. And it was after this, within two days, that the synchronicity occurred: I came across, in the unrelated book I was reading at the time, a quote from none other than Arthur Koestler. The quote, which was placed randomly in the book (to correspond with a loosely relevant story), involved something called "holons," something I'd never heard of before in my life.

I read the Koestler quote just two days after ordering The Roots of Coincidence, after putting it off for nearly a year. Funny, I thought, sniffing the synchronicity to come. I got fifty bucks that The Roots of Coincidence will Just Happen to be the source of Koestler's quote regarding holons.

Sure enough, The Roots of Coincidence does indeed contain the quote I'd read in the wholly random and unconnected book I'd Just Happened to be reading two days after placing the order (that book, a collection of travel stories I'd checked out randomly from the library, bore no overt mention of Koestler or holons on its cover or blurb, the quote occupying only a small space 400 pages in). And yes, I do count this as a solid incidence of synchronicity, considering that I ordered the Roots book just two days before reading of its "holons" for the first time in my life; and, furthermore, I consider this a rather notable synchronicity, due to the fact that it fits perfectly the pattern established by the dozens upon dozens of similar incidents I've experienced. And yes, I rather enjoyed the irony added by the book's subject matter, for The Roots of Coincidence is, after all, about synchronicity (though, this is not the first time I've experienced synchronicities surrounding a book about synchronicities, nor is it the second time). However, as interesting and enjoyable as this incident is, it is not what inspired me to write this post.

Instead, I was moved to blog about this experience due to what Koestler's book contained.

That is to say, The Roots of Coincidence reinforced my own experiences, and in a somewhat objective, verifiable fashion. More or less, Koestler echoed what I wrote in Synchronicity: One Man's Experience. Not only was there a general repetition of the same underlying patterns and phenomena I experienced and then described, but Koestler and his references also reached many of the same conclusions as in my book, at times with the same wording and models of action -- all of which I was unaware of until reading The Roots of Coincidence over the last couple days, only after I'd written my account and speculated on what it might mean. Sometimes, there is no better confirmation than seeing one's thoughts and experiences corroborated by a complete stranger, decades in the past (which goes double for subjects as speculative, mysterious, and empirical as synchronicity).

And it was this, in the end, that I enjoyed most about my purchase of The Roots of Coincidence: not the highly improbable "coincidence" it triggered, nor the laughter incurred by same, but instead the simple-but-rare vindication I experienced upon seeing the essence of my experiences recounted in a forty-year-old book I'd read only after the fact. That feeling can't be bought, or it would cost a fortune if it could.

6/21/14 - The Divide

New suspense novel from A.A. Garrison: The Divide

Blurb:

Our world is filled with triangles. Structural triangles. Love triangles. That curiously understated musical instrument. Also, there are triangles of destruction, those which lock their points in a dangerous unity. 

Such is the triangle formed by the men of Boyd Street, nestled in the idyllic Appalachian mountains. 

Daniel Black is sick, out of work, and desperate. Malcolm Deal faces old age and its burdens, and an all-consuming need. Marky Joiner courts a deadly obsession with his next-door neighbor. Appearances aside, the men's struggles share a common thread: all stem from a divided mind, and the mental blind spots which accompany it. 

This is Boyd Street's fateful triangle, unsuspected in its quiet corner of the world. Only one man will emerge from it alive.

Get samples, read reviews, and buy the eBook at the following vendors:

Amazon  Barnes & Noble  Lulu  Kobo  Smashwords  Scribd

Buy the Print-on-Demand version here:

Lulu  Createspace

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.