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.

I Take Life, I Give Life

It's forever ago that I've had to kill anything (excluding the occasional mosquito or ants). I don't like killing at all. I'm like the old reflective gunslinger who's simply had enough of bloodshed.

But lately there's been a mouse at my place, terrorizing me, ripping into bags of Oreos and corn chips and who knows what all. One night I was sitting there and heard a noise but just figured it was my dog Underbrush, but when I looked, she wasn't there! That's when I discovered, there's some other life form in the house!

Since then I had been trying to catch it. The first time the trap just set there for several days, nothing. Then, because this is one of the newer mousetraps that don't work as well, the mouse ate the corn chip but didn't get caught. Then a couple days ago I reset it and made it more sensitive, with the mouse finally getting caught this morning.

I got up and looked to where the mousetrap was but it wasn't there. Just a little more looking and I discovered it with a mouse in it that was still alive. His head was under the bar but he wasn't dead -- O crap! There'd surely be no releasing him in the wild, because the bar had to have done severe damage.

This is very unpleasant for me to say, but it was simply out of mercy, that I had to take the thing outside and kill it, as quickly and mercifully as possible. That was a terrible way to start my day, and I could barely think of anything else afterward, feeling very sick.

Later in the morning, then, I went out to the country, taking pictures. I have my iPod camera and I like some of the pictures I get. I was messing around at this bridge, a place I've never actually stopped before. So it was a one in a trillion kind of thing that I happened to be there.

I climbed down the bank, went down below the bridge, saw a cool shot maybe 50 yards to the east, near some dead trees with water way up them. I went over, took my pictures, then headed back. While going, then, I saw a good sized catfish on the ground, some bloodiness on its mouth area, but it was still moving its tail.

There was no one around, yet someone, maybe an hour before, maybe 10 minutes, whatever, had left a catfish behind. How terrible, because a catfish is a desirable fish, nothing to leave to die on the bank. Unlike, say, a carp, or something worse, something that is technically illegal to throw back. A catfish is far from that category!

So I got a hold of its tail and put it back in the water. It started moving and swam slowly away. Of course I have no idea what will become of it, whether it will survive, but you have to admit its odds are better in the water than on the bank!

I don't know why I had this kind of morning. I haven't seen a dead mouse in years and I don't know that I've ever come upon a live catfish on the bank before. Anyway, the bottom line is, I both killed and preserved life, all in one morning...