On Coincidences, Bitches.
The Daily News
1 Yesterday Caitlin showed me this.
2 Ready?
3 Here.
3 Here.
4 Here is the link: How to Fold Fitted Sheets
5 Good laughs first thing in the morning.
6 I was blabbering about something or other and Caitlin came over and demanded that I hand her my laptop, which I of course did.
7 I started talking, and she said, "Dad. What I am about to show you is funnier than anything you have to say right now!"
8 She said it in a fun way, by the way. I knew I could trust her, because she's got a great sense of humor.
9 The title sold me.
10 Steps four and five slayed me.
11 My kinda stuff.
12 Thanks, K.T.
13 Moving On, Part One: I liked it enough that I sent a test email with the piece in it to a few friends to see their reactions. The first one I sent was to my friend John Arnolfo, the second I messed up on the email address, and the third went to Rosi Hollinbeck, who enjoyed it, noting of course that most wimminz can handle folding fitted sheets.
14 I got home last night, had some dinner, and then hopped online with coffee and chocolate in hand. I went into my emails, saw one that had not been delivered. I re-mailed it, so we'll see if it gets where it needed to.
15 And John had responded with complete shock. His wife Effie was showing him how to fold fitted sheets when the email arrived! He was blown away. I'll ask if I can cut/paste his email after I have written this, but I did have to share that one.
16 The coincidences, my friends, have been soaring lately.
17 I already have several that are astounding. Some I can share, others I can't, or I won't. I began jotting a few down, but nothing as large as the one with John and the fitted sheets. This is, of course, presuming his wife Effie hadn't already read it. If that's the case, it's not a coincidence at all. But it does fall directly in the middle of a mild storm of coincidences that have come in like the weather.
18 Here is one I can share. Let me preface by saying I have two Facebooks, one for students, teachers, staff, alumni, etc., and another for family and close friends.
19 I did that so that my family stuff would focus more on family rather than work, and that they would stay separated from the one for students, teachers, et al. I didn't particularly want people I work with to see pictures of me doing cannonballs into small swimming pools.
20 In natural fashion, the two Facebooks began criss-crossing a bit, so while existing as two separate entities, the two have officially meshed and bumped into one another. Currently, the one with the snowy profile is the family/friends one. The one with G-Pa and the Beauties is the school/et al one.
21 Once I retired, I figured everyone was essentially my friend anyway.
22 I had been using the same profile picture for both lately; I usually don't. It got confusing even for the Facebook people.
23 I decided to change my "home" profile to a wonderful picture I took the day my sister Linda, her husband Randy and I met up in Tahoe on a whim a few weeks back. We were up at the D.L. Bliss overlook on the South Shore, when I looked up and saw the sun shining down over the snow. I took a picture and in recent days, made it my profile pic for the "family" Facebook. It looks like this:
24 At one point in the past couple of days, Linda gave the picture a like, and a positive comment on my fam FB. I replied, "Proof of God." Here is a link to that stream:
25 Later that night, I was watching an old episode of House. House was doing his usual negativity scene, when suddenly someone said, "Proof of God." With a little help from Helene, I traced this to Season 7, Episode 7 entitled "A Pox on Our House." I didn't have time to hunt down which character said those words, but I will. Bottom line: one of the characters said, "Proof of God" in that episode, right after, not before I had written that in Linda's comments.
26 When this happens, when this sort of coincidence reveals itself, it is usually around Halloween, or when intense things are happening in my life. I wouldn't consider the past couple of weeks intense, but I did get pulled out of my game just a bit. The coincidences began coming in like mild storms.
27 This all began out of nowhere. I didn't bother paying attention to very many, particularly when I was writing about Yuri Geller, the spoon-bender, and his arch nemesis James Randi.
28 I began writing about them, but backed off, fearing I was going to paint myself into a corner. The Amazing Randi was a serious investigator and whistle-blower on people who claim psychic abilities.
29 I was ready to throw a bunch of info out there that presented the more pragmatic side to the sorts of stuff that has followed me over the years. The intention was to establish balance. Are some people prone to psychic gifts? Or are there causal explanations for this sort of stuff?
30 I figured I should show the other side to my own beliefs and experiences. Why? The same reason The Amazing Randi calls some of these "psychics" out. There are people out there who prey on innocent people, many of whom have experienced severe trauma in their lives. There are also "psychic" charlatans willing to take advantage of such people, claim religious intervention, and charge heroic fees. I was willing to give it over to scientific research, with a willing surrender to the fact that acausal phenomena simply doesn't exist. I stood adamant. I felt that way for at least twelve seconds. Then this happened:
31 I turned on the television the other night and there was a movie on about a woman who scammed people with religion, only to discover later on that she DID have psychic abilities. This was on right after I had read James Randi's bio and familiarized myself with his research.
32 Meanwhile, my television stopped allowing me to record HD shows yesterday because I had too many recorded, so we erased all but three shows early in the day, before I got John's email. That film was erased from my recordings. Last night I got upset that I had erased it, but decided to hunt the film down. Pragmatic investigator over here.
33 It was pretty easy. I went on the TCM sight and found it. It aired on April 12, and was a 1938 film called Tarnished Angel. Here is the blurb about it:
34 That's an amazing coincidence, since I had just read about The Amazing Randi whistle-blowing on religious charlatans. Uri Geller, the spoon-bender, once claimed that the only reason Randi went into that career was because he was trying to hide the fact that he was a real psychic. Geller never could prove it, of course. I learned all that stuff the past few days, and came away with a great deal of respect for James Randi, enough so that I could not only see his point of view, but also question my own.
Shortly afterward, TCM showed the film Tarnished Angel. It essentially flashed on, then disappeared. I had done one of those "record" moments where I accidentally recorded the last five minutes of a film.
My response?
I saw enough of Tarnished Angel to make me want to plunge back into the all the coincidences that have happened in the past few weeks.
As I write these words this morning, I am watching a documentary from Morgan Freeman's Through the Wormhole. It was finishing up, and some guy just said, "It got interesting." I had already written item 35 last night. So this one is just out of the oven. Are you getting this? Let us travel backwards in time to what I wrote last night:
35 It got interesting, but life traveled fast this past week. I'm glad I caught that film for you, although I know little more about it except when it aired. That is fact. When it played can be looked up. That coincidence connected. That movie aired on Tuesday, April 12 at 9:30 a.m. My DN for that day was written the night before. I researched and even cut out a ton about the Uri/Randi stuff. Coincidence? Of course it's a coincidence.
Here are a few more. Let's travel still further back in time:
36 I wrote my entire DN of Tuesday, April 5 by making it similar to Homer's Odyssey. That image hit me while driving through the Valley Fair/Santana Row area of Steven's Creek on my way to visit Ken Ponticelli at Indy, and Tracy Wolcott at YB.
I remembered the story of Odysseus, of the Sirens, and of the dangerous straight that caused Odysseus to sail through waters that rushed past the monstrous Scylla, a multi-headed sailor-eating monster, and Charybdis, a fierce whirlpool that would destroy any ship coming near it.
I had great visits with both friends. When I returned home, I wrote it all up in the DN, and was ready to publish when it occurred to me that Google had a Greek theme celebrating the 120th anniversary of the modern Olympic games going on that same day!
I did see the Greek columns in the Google sketch, but never connected it with Odysseus, because the thoughts were unrelated. If you have ever traveled between those two shopping malls, AND if you have ever read The Odyssey, you could easily see the analogy happening as you enter those waters. The last thing on my mind was the Google image, which I rarely notice on any given day. Once in a while maybe, like anyone else.
37 So.There was a series of amazing coincidences going on during this time frame of the past few weeks, including several new ones. Ironically, those are happening this week, ironically a week when I was going to give the other side of the argument, the week I was to let The Amazing Randi, the very voice of practicality and pragmatism, be heard.
38 Looks like that isn't going to happen. The psychic stuff for me began years ago, when I first conducted the ghost stories in the Y.B. Theatre. Tons and tons of psychic coincidences happened around a "ghost" students found on a Ouija board. Her name was Heidi, and I have written and spoken extensively about her over the years.
Although I am strongly against Ouija boards, I do enjoy the Heidi trips. They rolled perfectly with interest in psychic phenomena. I even toyed a bit with what we called telekinesis years back. Listen:
39 To this day I claim that I could move the umbrella that used to hang upside-down from a pipe in the Piano Lab at Yerba Buena High School in San Jose. I've never been able to move anything else except that umbrella, but I could move that swinging thing. I could think it to hold still if it spun. I could think it to spin slowly to the right. I could think it to move left. I did this sometimes with two or three students watching. It worked almost ninety per cent of the time.
40 As a person who has experienced that stuff happening, I also know that I don't necessarily want to draw attention to it. I just live with it and enjoy it. In fact, I do know others who have had some of the same sorts of things happen over and over to them, and, while they would like to talk about it, many won't. I get it.
41 You can't really talk to "normal" people about it because you will look like a crazy person. My attitude is: so what? Maybe they look like close-minded individuals who are missing out on a major part of mortal existence.
Look. Many people believe in religion, but claiming psychic stuff? Hmmm. And sometimes people will get downright angry, or demand that a person with those abilities move a pencil, or an anvil.
I could never move a piece of paper, let alone an anvil. The umbrella? For whatever reason, yes. If I could concentrate when the room was quiet, and had positive people around me, I always felt I could move it. It moved. People saw it happen. I've never been able to do that with anything else.
Here is another thing that others who feel they have psychic abilities say: The stuff works best when it is quiet, and when I can concentrate lightly. It takes a relaxed state to get to that level. I couldn't give lessons on how to do this, but the relaxed state can work, and it appears essential. There is a huge "however" though. Listen again. You've read this far. Listen:
42 If The Amazing Randi came flying into my classroom with cameras, press people, reporters, microphones, and high-pitched questions, nothing "psychic" would come of it. Using these gifts requires meditation, silence, and mild concentration.
43 Have you ever thought of a person and then within seconds, they would knock at your door, or email you? It is along those lines. Or if you're religious: have you ever prayed so hard that something amazing came of it?
You can't bring people back from the dead, but you can pray hard for things. I think it brings a positivity, and that positivity is causal, the same way negativity is causal. And no, this is not going to be a religious lecture of any sort. Stop right there on that one. But please listen yet again:
You know that you can cause a bad day. The very declaration that you are having a bad day is a self-fulfilling prophecy. You can also sail through a series of bad things happening on the same day, and stay positive. My guess is that it might not turn it around, but that you have a better chance of turning it around with a positive attitude. It's not easy, but it works.
44 Moving On, Part Two: All the coincidences, psychic connections, ones, nines, and clicking things, electrical coincidences, all of them could be rounded up into one conclusion: these things happen. Heidi trips, I called them for years.
I don't know if there is a ghost named Heidi. But she was the name the students at YB came up with, and her name, as well as the numbers one and nine have repeatedly been a part of my "career" of coincidences. All that stuff happens throughout the year, but they also happen, as stated earlier, like the weather.
45 I have likened it to the little boy Cole in the classic film The Sixth Sense. The poor kid sees dead people all the time. I don't. But I have coincidences all the time. And when they storm, they storm for a week, sometimes two or three weeks.
46 So I've no idea why the coincidences are on high alert right now, but it has been crazy. If you re-read this DN in a month, it will make you think a bit more about it all.
47 It doesn't scare me. I stay away from all that dark stuff. I just like the coincidences that happen, just because they do.
48 Proof of God, I imagine.
49 Or not.
50 Well.
51 I never expected to turn down this road last night. I had at least two or three more, but no.
52 This DN drained me though.
53 So I'm gonna put this one to bed. Coincidences, bitches.
54 Something to them.
55 I gottago.
56 Thanks a bunch for listening. I do appreciate my readers.
57 They'll be plenty more. Meanwhile, stay spiritual.
58 See you again.
59 See you again.
60 Peace.
5 Good laughs first thing in the morning.
6 I was blabbering about something or other and Caitlin came over and demanded that I hand her my laptop, which I of course did.
7 I started talking, and she said, "Dad. What I am about to show you is funnier than anything you have to say right now!"
8 She said it in a fun way, by the way. I knew I could trust her, because she's got a great sense of humor.
9 The title sold me.
10 Steps four and five slayed me.
11 My kinda stuff.
12 Thanks, K.T.
13 Moving On, Part One: I liked it enough that I sent a test email with the piece in it to a few friends to see their reactions. The first one I sent was to my friend John Arnolfo, the second I messed up on the email address, and the third went to Rosi Hollinbeck, who enjoyed it, noting of course that most wimminz can handle folding fitted sheets.
14 I got home last night, had some dinner, and then hopped online with coffee and chocolate in hand. I went into my emails, saw one that had not been delivered. I re-mailed it, so we'll see if it gets where it needed to.
15 And John had responded with complete shock. His wife Effie was showing him how to fold fitted sheets when the email arrived! He was blown away. I'll ask if I can cut/paste his email after I have written this, but I did have to share that one.
16 The coincidences, my friends, have been soaring lately.
17 I already have several that are astounding. Some I can share, others I can't, or I won't. I began jotting a few down, but nothing as large as the one with John and the fitted sheets. This is, of course, presuming his wife Effie hadn't already read it. If that's the case, it's not a coincidence at all. But it does fall directly in the middle of a mild storm of coincidences that have come in like the weather.
18 Here is one I can share. Let me preface by saying I have two Facebooks, one for students, teachers, staff, alumni, etc., and another for family and close friends.
19 I did that so that my family stuff would focus more on family rather than work, and that they would stay separated from the one for students, teachers, et al. I didn't particularly want people I work with to see pictures of me doing cannonballs into small swimming pools.
20 In natural fashion, the two Facebooks began criss-crossing a bit, so while existing as two separate entities, the two have officially meshed and bumped into one another. Currently, the one with the snowy profile is the family/friends one. The one with G-Pa and the Beauties is the school/et al one.
21 Once I retired, I figured everyone was essentially my friend anyway.
22 I had been using the same profile picture for both lately; I usually don't. It got confusing even for the Facebook people.
23 I decided to change my "home" profile to a wonderful picture I took the day my sister Linda, her husband Randy and I met up in Tahoe on a whim a few weeks back. We were up at the D.L. Bliss overlook on the South Shore, when I looked up and saw the sun shining down over the snow. I took a picture and in recent days, made it my profile pic for the "family" Facebook. It looks like this:
25 Later that night, I was watching an old episode of House. House was doing his usual negativity scene, when suddenly someone said, "Proof of God." With a little help from Helene, I traced this to Season 7, Episode 7 entitled "A Pox on Our House." I didn't have time to hunt down which character said those words, but I will. Bottom line: one of the characters said, "Proof of God" in that episode, right after, not before I had written that in Linda's comments.
27 This all began out of nowhere. I didn't bother paying attention to very many, particularly when I was writing about Yuri Geller, the spoon-bender, and his arch nemesis James Randi.
28 I began writing about them, but backed off, fearing I was going to paint myself into a corner. The Amazing Randi was a serious investigator and whistle-blower on people who claim psychic abilities.
29 I was ready to throw a bunch of info out there that presented the more pragmatic side to the sorts of stuff that has followed me over the years. The intention was to establish balance. Are some people prone to psychic gifts? Or are there causal explanations for this sort of stuff?
30 I figured I should show the other side to my own beliefs and experiences. Why? The same reason The Amazing Randi calls some of these "psychics" out. There are people out there who prey on innocent people, many of whom have experienced severe trauma in their lives. There are also "psychic" charlatans willing to take advantage of such people, claim religious intervention, and charge heroic fees. I was willing to give it over to scientific research, with a willing surrender to the fact that acausal phenomena simply doesn't exist. I stood adamant. I felt that way for at least twelve seconds. Then this happened:
31 I turned on the television the other night and there was a movie on about a woman who scammed people with religion, only to discover later on that she DID have psychic abilities. This was on right after I had read James Randi's bio and familiarized myself with his research.
32 Meanwhile, my television stopped allowing me to record HD shows yesterday because I had too many recorded, so we erased all but three shows early in the day, before I got John's email. That film was erased from my recordings. Last night I got upset that I had erased it, but decided to hunt the film down. Pragmatic investigator over here.
33 It was pretty easy. I went on the TCM sight and found it. It aired on April 12, and was a 1938 film called Tarnished Angel. Here is the blurb about it:
9:30 AM | TARNISHED ANGEL (1938) |
A phony evangelist finds religion herself when her powers actually heal someone.
BW-67 mins,
|
34 That's an amazing coincidence, since I had just read about The Amazing Randi whistle-blowing on religious charlatans. Uri Geller, the spoon-bender, once claimed that the only reason Randi went into that career was because he was trying to hide the fact that he was a real psychic. Geller never could prove it, of course. I learned all that stuff the past few days, and came away with a great deal of respect for James Randi, enough so that I could not only see his point of view, but also question my own.
Shortly afterward, TCM showed the film Tarnished Angel. It essentially flashed on, then disappeared. I had done one of those "record" moments where I accidentally recorded the last five minutes of a film.
My response?
I saw enough of Tarnished Angel to make me want to plunge back into the all the coincidences that have happened in the past few weeks.
As I write these words this morning, I am watching a documentary from Morgan Freeman's Through the Wormhole. It was finishing up, and some guy just said, "It got interesting." I had already written item 35 last night. So this one is just out of the oven. Are you getting this? Let us travel backwards in time to what I wrote last night:
35 It got interesting, but life traveled fast this past week. I'm glad I caught that film for you, although I know little more about it except when it aired. That is fact. When it played can be looked up. That coincidence connected. That movie aired on Tuesday, April 12 at 9:30 a.m. My DN for that day was written the night before. I researched and even cut out a ton about the Uri/Randi stuff. Coincidence? Of course it's a coincidence.
Here are a few more. Let's travel still further back in time:
36 I wrote my entire DN of Tuesday, April 5 by making it similar to Homer's Odyssey. That image hit me while driving through the Valley Fair/Santana Row area of Steven's Creek on my way to visit Ken Ponticelli at Indy, and Tracy Wolcott at YB.
I remembered the story of Odysseus, of the Sirens, and of the dangerous straight that caused Odysseus to sail through waters that rushed past the monstrous Scylla, a multi-headed sailor-eating monster, and Charybdis, a fierce whirlpool that would destroy any ship coming near it.
I had great visits with both friends. When I returned home, I wrote it all up in the DN, and was ready to publish when it occurred to me that Google had a Greek theme celebrating the 120th anniversary of the modern Olympic games going on that same day!
I did see the Greek columns in the Google sketch, but never connected it with Odysseus, because the thoughts were unrelated. If you have ever traveled between those two shopping malls, AND if you have ever read The Odyssey, you could easily see the analogy happening as you enter those waters. The last thing on my mind was the Google image, which I rarely notice on any given day. Once in a while maybe, like anyone else.
37 So.There was a series of amazing coincidences going on during this time frame of the past few weeks, including several new ones. Ironically, those are happening this week, ironically a week when I was going to give the other side of the argument, the week I was to let The Amazing Randi, the very voice of practicality and pragmatism, be heard.
38 Looks like that isn't going to happen. The psychic stuff for me began years ago, when I first conducted the ghost stories in the Y.B. Theatre. Tons and tons of psychic coincidences happened around a "ghost" students found on a Ouija board. Her name was Heidi, and I have written and spoken extensively about her over the years.
Although I am strongly against Ouija boards, I do enjoy the Heidi trips. They rolled perfectly with interest in psychic phenomena. I even toyed a bit with what we called telekinesis years back. Listen:
39 To this day I claim that I could move the umbrella that used to hang upside-down from a pipe in the Piano Lab at Yerba Buena High School in San Jose. I've never been able to move anything else except that umbrella, but I could move that swinging thing. I could think it to hold still if it spun. I could think it to spin slowly to the right. I could think it to move left. I did this sometimes with two or three students watching. It worked almost ninety per cent of the time.
40 As a person who has experienced that stuff happening, I also know that I don't necessarily want to draw attention to it. I just live with it and enjoy it. In fact, I do know others who have had some of the same sorts of things happen over and over to them, and, while they would like to talk about it, many won't. I get it.
41 You can't really talk to "normal" people about it because you will look like a crazy person. My attitude is: so what? Maybe they look like close-minded individuals who are missing out on a major part of mortal existence.
Look. Many people believe in religion, but claiming psychic stuff? Hmmm. And sometimes people will get downright angry, or demand that a person with those abilities move a pencil, or an anvil.
I could never move a piece of paper, let alone an anvil. The umbrella? For whatever reason, yes. If I could concentrate when the room was quiet, and had positive people around me, I always felt I could move it. It moved. People saw it happen. I've never been able to do that with anything else.
Here is another thing that others who feel they have psychic abilities say: The stuff works best when it is quiet, and when I can concentrate lightly. It takes a relaxed state to get to that level. I couldn't give lessons on how to do this, but the relaxed state can work, and it appears essential. There is a huge "however" though. Listen again. You've read this far. Listen:
42 If The Amazing Randi came flying into my classroom with cameras, press people, reporters, microphones, and high-pitched questions, nothing "psychic" would come of it. Using these gifts requires meditation, silence, and mild concentration.
43 Have you ever thought of a person and then within seconds, they would knock at your door, or email you? It is along those lines. Or if you're religious: have you ever prayed so hard that something amazing came of it?
You can't bring people back from the dead, but you can pray hard for things. I think it brings a positivity, and that positivity is causal, the same way negativity is causal. And no, this is not going to be a religious lecture of any sort. Stop right there on that one. But please listen yet again:
You know that you can cause a bad day. The very declaration that you are having a bad day is a self-fulfilling prophecy. You can also sail through a series of bad things happening on the same day, and stay positive. My guess is that it might not turn it around, but that you have a better chance of turning it around with a positive attitude. It's not easy, but it works.
44 Moving On, Part Two: All the coincidences, psychic connections, ones, nines, and clicking things, electrical coincidences, all of them could be rounded up into one conclusion: these things happen. Heidi trips, I called them for years.
I don't know if there is a ghost named Heidi. But she was the name the students at YB came up with, and her name, as well as the numbers one and nine have repeatedly been a part of my "career" of coincidences. All that stuff happens throughout the year, but they also happen, as stated earlier, like the weather.
45 I have likened it to the little boy Cole in the classic film The Sixth Sense. The poor kid sees dead people all the time. I don't. But I have coincidences all the time. And when they storm, they storm for a week, sometimes two or three weeks.
47 It doesn't scare me. I stay away from all that dark stuff. I just like the coincidences that happen, just because they do.
48 Proof of God, I imagine.
49 Or not.
50 Well.
51 I never expected to turn down this road last night. I had at least two or three more, but no.
52 This DN drained me though.
53 So I'm gonna put this one to bed. Coincidences, bitches.
54 Something to them.
55 I gottago.
56 Thanks a bunch for listening. I do appreciate my readers.
57 They'll be plenty more. Meanwhile, stay spiritual.
58 See you again.
59 See you again.
60 Peace.
~H~
fin.
12:03 a.m.
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