Midas Touch No!

The last month or so I've been re-reading some of my favorite psychoanalytical texts, which naturally include C.G. Jung's Psychology and Alchemy, one of my go-to books for years. And something weird happened to me, much weirder than usual.

You probably recall what alchemy is all about. The changing by chemical processes of other forms of matter into gold, tough to do. But Jung argued that the alchemists -- the good ones -- had other more profound motives, coming up with psychological gold, the coming to the fullness of the Self. It was the gold standard of self-help exercises.

Unfortunately, when I start messing with stuff like this, things happen. I hate to mention a few years ago when I was messing with sacred scriptures, a la Nebuchadnezzar, I went crazy and was literally a wild animal in the fields. Yeah. Well, this time someone forgot to warn me about the spirits of gold, so I've had a problem with turning things into gold. Anything at home I've touched, including all the TV remotes. Solid gold. I took a few of them to the jewelry store and now I can't change the channel. The TV's stuck on Jerry Springer's channel and I'm about sick of ads for The General Insurance.

The problem all started when I was concentrating very hard on my reading, reading with one eye shut. My theory is I was overloading one side of the brain, which Jung never thought of. To make matters worse, since I've been doing this for a few years, I was wearing my reading glasses, which only has one lens. It really magnifies things, overloading the brain that much faster.

And now, trying to deal with turning things into gold -- the Midas touch -- is tougher than you'd think. I wanted to go to the country and think it over, but I couldn't drive my car. And so forth. I can't have a gold car sitting in the driveway. They'll put me back in the home for crazy nuisances.

As I continued to mess with this stuff, then, I made some progress in controlling it. I discovered I could turn it off by saying "Midas touch no," and turn it on again with "Midas touch yes." It worked hit and miss the first few times, but with persistence, I got it so it was extremely reliable.

OK, this leads to the conundrum I'm in now. Having the Midas touch did wonders for my confidence. You can imagine. My confidence before was crap; now, so to speak, it's gold. I was operating with the gold standard of confidence. It seemed like there was nothing I couldn't do.

So guess what... Without having an account at Match.com or any other dating site, I met a woman, Edna, and came on to her with the utmost confidence, the way they like it. Smooth as silk, right there in the supermarket, "Hey baby," and my confident pitch, my chatter, my romantic spiel, my love patter, was such that it won the day ... and the lady. We started seeing each other. I had my ordinary hardtop car cut down to a convertible, and the little bits of hair I have on the sides of my head were flapping in the breeze. We talked of going to Mexico and sitting on the beach, writing our names in the sand, then standing back and daring the waves to efface them. (In Mexico you get up when you want, eat when you want; everything you do you do when you want. Why people escape to the U.S. is beyond me.)

The subject of gold came up, as in friendship rings, and I'd had the Midas touch set on NO for quite a while, allowing me to freely handle her, to the extent she would let me. I try to be subtle, you know, never having been a real wolf, a bear when it comes to the hands, and certainly I was brought up not to be boorish with women. My mom drilled that in my head, always pointing to Dad as the kind of gentleman I should be. And Dad did pretty damned good, out of all the women in the world getting my mother.

She -- Edna, my girlfriend -- was saying, "So you say 'Midas touch yes,' 'Midas touch no,' yes, no, yes, no, like that, and you're able to override C.G. Jung's teachings on alchemy and produce actual gold by mere touch." "Yes," I said, "Midas touch no, Midas touch yes, just like that." Catch my big mistake?

OK, she's so impressed by my power that now she's all hands, a fox, a wolf, boorish. But I'm leaning back, my eyes are rolled back so far in my head I can see the stars behind me. Naturally at this point I'm oblivious to any and all consequences. Given my excitement, of course I lunged ahead and was all over her, when-- Great God in Heaven! Infernal Spirits of a Christless Hell! What have I done? I looked down, aghast, and Edna was solid gold!

I raised my hands, looking at those two instruments of destruction with the impulse of searing hatred in my eyes. "You flaky sons of bitches!" I cried in anger. "No, wait, I have to get a grip. First things first, 'Midas touch no,'" turning it off.

But what was done was done... I didn't have a way to reverse the process. I didn't know what to do. Basically this is what's happened: I went from the sweetest, dirtiest girlfriend I've ever had to the biggest, nudest paperweight in the world. Fully nude except for an Egyptian tiara, worth her weight in gold, certainly, but at the same time worthless. You can't sell the transformed corpse of your girlfriend. They say.

And it's these flaky sons-of-bitchin' hands that did this! And my big mouth.

The Best Number of Slaps When Slapping

Here's a post for both classes of people, those into numerology and those into violence. It combines the violence of slapping with numerology and the "feeling" that goes with particular numbered sequences. Practically, in my opinion, if you were to slap someone, one slap is usually good enough. But beware, if you slap twice!

Two is not usually good, strange as it sounds. But it's something of a mystery how numbers work. So that if you slap someone twice, it doesn't seem sufficient. Two is more than one, of course, but two always seems to demand a series. It demands three.

Think of it in terms of its sound: "SLAP, SLAP" ... trailing off, it's wimpy. But add the magical third and you've got a series worth the time, and somehow completely satisfying. "SLAP, SLAP, SLAP." Topped off, perhaps, with a single dismissing word, "There, sir, now back to your place!"

Numbers are a weird thing. I'm sure it's mental, but maybe it's also cosmic. Certainly the mind has an uneasy feeling if numbers are left hanging. But it feels entirely satisfied when there's a beginning, middle, and end. The word 'denouement' comes to mind. If the second is your idea of a denouement, then clearly your idea of denouement is all screwed up.

Remember in school when they taught us outlining? They said outlining can have two items, but preferably at least three. However, for whatever reason, it can't have just one item. If you start with a Roman numeral I, you have to have II. I've often thought of the quandary, what if there is no logical second on a particular topic? You're left with the options, I. Don't Outline It, or, II. Make Up Something. Another option, making II, would be to subdivide I, since you could zoom in on almost any subject. As an example: Say you lived on Earth when there was only one super continent, Gaia, before continental drift. And your topic was "The World's Continent." An inappropriate outline would be: I. Gaia. That wouldn't do, even though you only have one continent to work with. But zooming in, you might put, I. East Gaia, and, II. Other Directions of Gaia.

But I want to get back to the SLAPPING thing. It's sort of like Zorro quickly carving his Z on someone's back. The "Z" has those three lines, so it's "WHACK, WHACK, WHACK". Had his name been VORRO, you can see the problem, "WHACK, WHACK." He'd have to do something else, like stomp his foot on the third. That'd actually be a pretty cool thing, because it could offer variety to the show. Vorro does the two whacks, then a different third each time. Stomp his foot, stab the door, yell his name, etc. And the same thing with the Lone Ranger: "Hi-yo, Silver, Away!" Stop at "Hi-yo, Silver!" and it leaves you hanging. Silver doesn't know what to do!

Now, in slapping, the third slap is the satisfaction slap, obviously. But what of a four-slap series? To my mind, it feels excessive. But it really depends on what you're trying to accomplish. Maybe you want to truly cause damage, in which case the more slaps the better, certainly stopping before you hurt your hand and aren't able to slap in the future.

There's a whole thing you can read about in C.G. Jung's writings on the Trinity (3) and the Quarternity (4). In many cases, Jung saw a quarternity as more symbolically appropriate, not stopping short. Whether it be the godhead or a footstool. Be that as it may, and even if it sounds like a subject for me and other high-minded professionals, specialists of the mind and spirit, there are important implications for the rest of you, the common run of man. We might settle and say an odd three is good and sometimes four. Still, that even four might demand an odd fifth, because there's something intangible suggesting that those the beats of a slapping sequence need a final flourish, an ultimate slap, one standing alone.

Some of these things you can visualize without doing them, which would probably be best, not only for the other person's face, but for your hand. You get a sense of it in a flash, then if needed, for further appreciation, you could just move your hand in the air without making contact. That's all I'm doing here, and I find that in an experiment it works tolerably well.

I honestly cannot see much reason to go beyond five slaps. Unless, let's just let our imagination run wild, you're trying for the Guinness record in slapping, at which point the feeling of numbers is no longer germane. And simply trying for the highest number possible doesn't carry a feeling. Plus, it's all bogus at that point anyway, because they'd give you 53 minutes to slap, and 7 minutes break every hour, which to my way of thinking is simply dishonest. Either you slapped continuously -- this is the way I see it -- or you didn't truly accomplish something worthwhile. Anyone can take breaks.

Buckets: An Incredible Synchronicity

I've never been one to see meaningless coincidences. Only a few times. Once a guy said to me, "I don't believe in coincidences." And I said, "What a coincidence! I was going to say the same thing!" Usually I just think, It's a big world. The same things happen to everyone. Of course there's going to be similarities and parallels.

But then, like it or not, it starts getting creepy. You've got on a blue shirt, some other guy has one. Your brother gets a speeding ticket, someone else you know gets one. And maybe there's a real kick in the pants: Your electricity goes out and suddenly everyone in the neighborhood's off, too! At some point, even the diehard skeptic has to admit something's going on...

Is it evidence of the Divine working in our midst? I'm not willing to say that precisely, not quite yet. Because, frankly, the trivial nature of many coincidences keeps me from it. Still, it's something to examine. Maybe my reticence comes from having too big an image of the Divine, so the problem's with me. If the Divine, let's say, being eternal and therefore ageless, is still like a cosmic one-year-old, through no fault of its own, then a lot of immature bullshit tinkering with people's heads wouldn't be out of the picture. It's something to consider.

Instead of that, I'm more open to a reexamination of the theory of synchronicity, one of the famous theories C.G. Jung stole from The Police, inspired as he was by their great album. The theory states, basically, there is a discernible connecting principle between apparently unrelated phenomena that happen simultaneously or nearly so in time. Along with this, it can be apart from any cause and effect relationship that we usually posit, being therefore termed "acausal."

For example, let's say there's Horse A in Florida, Horse B in Oregon, and Horse C in Maine. Each horse is sick on Tuesday, well on Wednesday, sick on Thursday, well on Friday, sick on Saturday, and finally put down on Sunday. At first glance there's nothing obvious to our limited sensibilities indicating a connection or any cause and effect relationship (with the distance between Florida, Oregon, and Maine), so it simply seems like a pure coincidence. But looking deeper I think we can make an excellent case for a meaningful synchronicity, because what are the chances of three horses in a single example being called Horse A, Horse B, and Horse C? There's a clear pattern.

With that in mind, imagine how freaked out I was yesterday when I saw the newspaper's headline: "SUMMER BUCKET LIST." The day before (Sunday) I had my post, "I Pour Contempt On All My Pride," involving buckets. Then yesterday (Monday), the same day as the newspaper, I was working on my post, "My Great Memories of Buckets." The timeline went like this: 1) On Sunday I had no knowledge what the Monday paper would say. 2) On Monday I was working on the post, then saw the newspaper, then went to finish it up.

How does stuff like that happen? And what does it mean? I haven't seen anything freakier since the day I was imagining what Johnny Cash's funeral would be like, and the next day I read online that he died. Meaning that my imagining of his funeral was happening literally as he was dying! That's odd, yes, but this bucket thing blows my mind!

Please, help me. If you have a thought on this issue, an opinion, some kind of good counsel, please leave me a comment. If you don't, who knows, maybe I'll start imagining ... imagining ... imagining ... and it'll be you who kicks the bucket.