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.

My Great Memories Of Buckets

To me, the bucket is more than a bucket. It's like a picture of the fullness of humanity, or existence period, androgynous, at once receptive and able to pour forth. How complete, and how interesting to point out.

Other than that, I like the bucket's functionality. And all the great memories I have of buckets.

The first example is the classic pail. How often I remember, and this is back in the old days, when we would go to the hand pump to get a bucket of water. We then had a ladle, itself a miniature bucket, that we would drink from, and communally at that!

I suppose I may owe some of my immunity to disease now to my ignorantly taking in other people's germs all those years ago. Today, of course, I'd never drink from a pail that's been within 50 feet of someone else. Which means I might drop dead at any moment.

I also remember pans and things that do pretty much the same thing a bucket does. You pour water from one to the other and obviously the water doesn't know any difference. For water, anything that impedes its flow, from a drinking glass to the Hoover Dam is just a bucket or, more accurately, a bucket-like thing.

Grandma used to boil water in a pan like this. And next thing you knew, she'd be putting food in it, like macaroni or spaghetti. You can probably guess what came next: She'd cook it and we'd end up eating whatever it was.

This kind of little pan, again with some of the same qualities of a bucket proper was always good for making something like Jello. The way I remember it, it was silver in color, and there were also some that were white. I like the silver best, because it seems to me like silver gets cold faster than white. But I'm open, seriously, to being corrected on that belief, if anyone thinks they know better.

Then there's the flat pan without handles. This is a good one if handles aren't your thing. And if you're not using it for hot water. If you're putting cold water in it, it's no problem at all. It makes for a nice pan, indeed, the presentation being very spiffy and refreshing as well to the eye. But why you wouldn't want handles, who knows. It'd make a good water dish for the dog.

OK, now we're back on terra firma, because I do prefer handles on a bucket or a pan, anything of the bucket family. It gives you that extra portability. And if you're open to using hot water in addition to cold, you don't have to plan in advance. You simply may as well have handles. My memory of a pan like this is it was good for filling with water to soak your feet in. If your feet felt like soaking. A little bit of Epsom salts in there and it does the trick.

This one is a little more complicated. It's like a double bubble thing. You've got a bucket within a bucket, maybe a Chinese invention, going along with their box in a box theme. You're boiling water down below, then putting the top pan in the bottom, so it's very cool. You do eggs in it. Just looking at it, it's like a duplex apartment; everyone knows someone else is there, but you get used to it. Frankly, I'd much rather live in a horizontal duplex than a vertical one. But a double pan simply doesn't work if you orient it horizontally. Heat has one direction, straight up.


For tea kettles, which the double bubble pot also could be, I prefer the single. It's easy to use and easy to understand. You're not getting tangled up in all the handles, jutting out like a bull's horns. You've got one pot, one handle; it's all very clean and efficient, like a single bed as opposed to bunks. You put the water in it, boil it, and pour it on your teabag. Or you could use an infuser and make your tea in a more zen-like way, which I like to do sometimes. I find that doing things in slow motion and very intentionally sometimes brings me back to basic sanity. Sometimes.

This looks like a camping pail. It's small enough to fit on a camp stove. It seems like Charlie Chaplin had one like this in The Gold Rush, so we're talking a very old design here. You've got a guy in the silent movies, in a ramshackle cabin, boiling his shoe (to eat) in one of the bigger pans, probably the second from the top, then making his coffee in a little pail like this. I know people aren't near as finicky about how their coffee is cooked when they're camping or in a ramshackle cabin. Because out there if you get grounds in it, you just spit them out.

I hope you enjoyed my bucket list and my personal memories.

I Pour Contempt On All My Pride

It's time for a whole new life, of course strictly applied first to myself. No more pride! Bring out the buckets of pride killer, that I may pour contempt on all my pride! From here on out, my richest gain I shall count but loss.

Realistically, I don't have that much to be proud of. And that's not the declaration, the bitter words of a guy down in the dumps, because I'm not. By any true measure, I'm on top of the world. It's just that I've suddenly realized -- call it a much needed awakening, a kick in the spiritual pants -- that pride is basically worthless. I'm saying it by proxy for everyone else, too. Forbid it, that any of us should boast!

Am I guilty of overweening pride? I sure am. Like I just said, I believe it applies to everyone but I start with myself. All the vain things truly have charmed me, along with everyone else. So much so that I was essentially blinded to it. That's a weird thing about pride. It gets hold of you and it becomes your nature, it seems natural. But then you suddenly wake up and go "Whoa!" This isn't how it should be.

At least that's what I'm discovering. I'm in the process of discovering how deep it goes. It appears to go very deep, right where you dwell, to the most central part of your being. You start struttin' like a peacock, and everyone else is gagging. So you start thinking, "Bring in the buckets!"

That's a very vivid way of putting it, "Bring in the buckets! Summon the Bucket Brigade! Fill 'em up to the very brim, the buckets! And not just the buckets, but pots and pans, too, anything that serves to hold pride killer and contempt!" This is great stuff. And how about this? Cook it, too! Cook it! Put it on the fire! Crank up the heat! Get it good and boiling! This is going to burn, it's going to scald! Sounds terrible, really, but that's what I need!

I'm making it a public thing, the rigorous dousing I'm taking. It's right here in public, something that anyone with internet access can witness. Please link to this blog post. Let me be the guy who put it out there. I might be able to inspire others to pour contempt on their pride. I'll take the first step. The pride killer and contempt is boiling hot; please, turn it up some more!

Yes, I know this is going to hurt like bloody heck. Because I have all the pans totally boiling, so they're even starting to melt a little around the edges. The handles are piping hot. You'll need two potholders to get a grasp on them. And now here goes nothing...

My pride is getting the biggest scalding of its pathetic life! The cure demands my soul, my life, my all!