Oh boy, they came fast and curious during my trip to MN and back.
The first to waggle my eyebrows was a post I made from the basement of LittleBig Studio, which was home base for my grid attachment while away from home. It was a poem that I posted in my other blog, Fatguy's Journal (http://thefatguythatwas.blogspot.com/). It was originally written on July 17th of 1993 and seems to be about the InterNET/World Wide WEB. I don't remember what shape that was in back then, but I don't think I got anywhere near it until much later, when I checked out one of the early message boards that Phish fans were maintaining, which was just text and few if any pictures. Anyway, here's the poem:
Images from across the globe,
static movement along strobe,
a person miles away
placed in houses on display,
no question as to how their feelings lay,
they never come close to turning away.
Along the electric highway
the dreams and nightmares come,
shocking the mind with extremes,
leaving us despairing when done.
OK, maybe a stretch, but it bled into all of the other weirdness as well as my reading The Exegesis of Phillip K. Dick and made me wonder....
Next up was a little story that my friend Brent told me about posting a comment on FB about Grizzly Adams, not that the original post being commented upon was about him, but as an example...well, it goes on a bit there, but the payoff was my random suggestion that night that we should check out the Will Ferrell movie Casa de mi Padre, which had been recommended to me a few times. As we watched the credits we were stunned to see Dan Haggerty listed and wondered where in the film he had been. He popped on after the credits in a pretty funny fake commercial and cemented the awe...
On this trip I started letting the cat out of the bag as to my blogging my 20 year old journal, and how much of what I say there reflects upon my current situation. This led to a discussion with Wendy, also my friend and Brent's wife, about how circular our experiences in life can seem. I had also let my Mom know about the journal as well. While I was out, she dug out some papers I had written for a class I had taken in the '87-'88 school year, when I went to community college instead of high school. One of these papers, about the internal conflict between the side of us yearning for stability versus the side wishing for something new, seemed to lay out my current situation:
The instructor's question in the margin...just..hmmmm.
Then a couple of minor ones as I accompanied Brent and Wendy to St. Paul: On the way we saw a sign announcing that Charley Pride was coming to town, which made me think of seeing a clip of him performing on Hee Haw playing a Fender Coronado, a guitar I came to covet long ago when looking to purchase my first "real" electric guitar. I didn't have a chance to say anything about this, as the conversation had turned to the construction going on in the area, and now that I look it up the guitar was an Antigua, so only in my mistaken head was the Coronado, but that's the type of bass that Wendy's nephew Mike happened to be playing that night. Also, I had mentioned Girl Talk to them while we ate at a (sub par) pub and during a break in the music that night, someone at the table then mentioned Girl Talk in reference to Marc Ribot, of all things.
Now on to a better example which happened while driving through Idaho. My mp3 player started up a song by Atoms for Peace, so I upped the volume as I passed a Historical Marker Ahead sign. I turned to look and nearly lost my mind. I whipped the car around and drove right up to it to get this pic:
Just...too...weird.
There was one last one where, while hiking around Craters of the Moon National Park, a squirrel climbed up a dead tree nearby, chattered, rubbed himself along a branch and then settled in for a meal. A woman going the other direction asked me if I had been scolded. I told her that the outburst seemed directed at the world in general as opposed to being personal and moved on. Later, while listening to a PKD story in the car, there was mention of a scolding squirrel - that exact same wording again. However, now that I look, I see that scolding squirrels seem to be quite common, so it was only my ignorance of this commonality that gave it so much weight. In fact, I'll readily admit that all of these supposedly "wild" coincidences may only be so due to my ignorance of how the universe and our experience of it actually works.
To extrapolate on the notion of circular experience: perhaps we run along multiple circular tracks instead of the common idea of a straight line from birth to death. Every aspect of our lives has a circle and some are large while others are small, lending to how long it takes for things to come around. Smaller things like Grizzly Adams may spin pretty quickly, whereas overall philosophies about life staked out early, like my desire to escape the cage of a mundane existence, may take a while to get around again. (My amazement in that case also has to do with my ability to forget such things, apparently.) And perhaps, though we are unaware, hints of the future may also turn on these tracks and somehow at one point we get wind of them only to be awed when they come around again in full view. Further, I believe that I am at a point in my own existence where many of these circles are all intersecting at the same point, leading to my near overload and this post.
I have to admit, there's a bit of fear involved when all of this starts cascading....
Is it THE BIG ONE ?
