Michael Prescott's Blog

The third time it's enemy action

Years ago I posted a couple of essays on my author site called "Unusual Occurrences" and "More Unusual Occurrences." They were collections of mostly trivial and anecdotal synchronicities, coincidences, and premonitions from my personal life I still keep a record of such things in a journal.

Yes, I'm aware that they can be "explained" by the ever-helpful truism, usually delivered with condescending weariness, that in a universe of infinite possibilities, even very unlikely things are bound to happen now and then. How persuasive anyone finds this mantra is a personal matter. For me, it can explain a certain amount of strangeness in the world, but not an unlimited amount. 

Anyway, within the last 24 hours I had two such occurrences, both very trivial, and I figured I would mention them here. They do not prove anything, but to me they are indicative of the everyday role that psi plays in our lives — a role so clandestine and marginal that we are usually unaware of it. 

Yesterday I found myself thinking of a satirical variation on the nursery rhyme "Humpty Dumpty," which would begin, "Humpty Trumpty sat on a wall…" I thought this could be a clever dig at Donald Trump, but I was unable to complete the rhyme. Later that day I flipped through a copy of a magazine called The Week and came across this cartoon:

Political cartoon by Glenn McCoy, available online here.  

At a different time yesterday, I was musing on old-time special-effects master Ray Harryhausen, and specifically thinking about the death pose of his creation the Cyclops (in The 7th Voyage of Sinbad), which is almost identical to the death pose of his earlier creation, the Ymir (in Twenty Million Miles to Earth). The fact that he chose almost the exact same pose for both models, which were built around the same (refused) armature, struck me as either a stylistic decision or an inside joke. Anyway, the first thing I saw on my Facebook newsfeed this morning was a post from a Harryhausen group with this photo:

That's the Ymir in its death pose. 

Pure chance in both cases? Could be. I've been thinking a lot (in fact, too much) about Trump lately, and I've always been a bit Harryhausen-obsessed. But the specific parallels, right down to the fact that the Humpty Trumpty poem was unfinished in the cartoon just as I was unable to finish it in my thoughts, are suggestive to me.

As Goldfinger says in the movie named after him, "Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. The third time it's enemy action." Rightly or wrongly, when things like this happen often enough, I see a pattern. 

A simple synchronicity

I just read Linda Ronstadt's charmingly unpretentious memoir Simple Dreams, which I enjoyed very much. Many celebrity memoirs are tell-all, score-settling brag-o-grams, but none of this is true of Ronstadt's effort, which she appears to have written without the aid of a ghostwriter. She is unstinting in her praise of her colleagues and rivals, barely touches on her romances, and underplays her own commercial success to the point where a reader unfamiliar with the pop music scene of the '70s and '80s might be forgiven for wondering if she was really that big a deal. Even the Booklist reviewer seems to have been a bit misled in this regard, writing that Ronstadt "sold more than a million records" in her career. (The actual figure is north of 30 million records in the US alone.) 

One little incident recounted in Simple Dreams struck me as interesting in terms of the stuff we talk about on this blog. It's a very specific synchronicity:

The inspiration [of performing overseas in smaller venues] was short lived. We were soon back in the USA, pounding the same old circuit in the same distinctly uninspiring arenas. Add to this the gnawing loneliness of life lived perpetually in motion, with not enough time in any one place to nurture relationships or build trust. I was beginning to feel miserable. And trapped.

One night we were playing in Atlanta. We had spent the afternoon fooling around in the little shops that had been established in what is called Underground Atlanta, the recently excavated, fire-charred remains of the pre-Civil War city. Big, smudgy, black-ringed eyes were in style then, and I found what seemed like a particularly exotic way to achieve it in one of the little shops. It was an ancient cosmetic called kohl – new to my experience – which was some kind of black mineral ground into a fine powder, and recently shipped in from India. There was also a blue one, which was a departure for me, but I figured if I couldn't change my life so easily, I could at least change the color of my eye makeup, so I bought that too. It was packaged in a little clay pot with a pointed wooden stick screwed into the lid to use as an applicator.

I was hot to try it out and went immediately to the dressing room of the place we were playing (another arena) and started to smear the stuff around my eyes. The applicator stick and powdered medium were unfamiliar and clumsy for me to use, and I had accidentally dotted my cheeks with what looked like the blue measles. I finished the job of cleaning off all the little stray blue blobs and wondered what I was going to do for the forty-five minutes until I had to sing. I had finished the book I kept in my purse and was scowling at the concrete floor – wishing we were still in a European theater with cherubs [on the walls] and that I didn't have to face an all-night drive in the bus after the show – when someone knocked on the door, bringing me out of my little sulk. It was one of the security guards, who handed me a book that someone had sent backstage with a note attached saying that it was something he or she thought I might like. "Oh goody!" I thought. "Now I won't have to be bored."

I looked at the cover: The Vagabond, by Colette. "Never heard of this book," I thought. Never heard of Colette, either. She had just one name. Like Cher.

I opened the book and began to read. The story is set in France in 1910. La Belle Epoque! My favorite era! There is a woman about my age who performs in music halls sitting backstage in her dressing room. She is applying blue greasepaint circles around her eyes, and some of it has run down her face. Blue for her too? She also uses kohl. Kohl again! I just heard of the stuff that afternoon.

What else? She is kind of bored. She has already read the book she has with her. She is waiting to go onstage and do her act. She has lost inspiration to continue in her career as "a woman of letters" and just trying to establish herself as "a woman on the stage." Things are not going as well as they could, and she knows that she is "in for a bad fit of the blues." She is thinking about her dog and her kind-of-awkward boyfriend whom she misses somewhat. There is a knock on her door …

I have a beloved Akita dog and an awkward boyfriend somewhere. I feel that I'm "in for a bad fit of the blues." I can relate!

I finished the book that night on the long bus ride. I started to ponder: How can I work in a more theatrical setting, in smaller theaters, and not a different place every night?

As she tells it, immediately afterward she called a friend in New York for advice. He suggested that she come to New York and meet Joseph Papp, the innovative producer known for his "Shakespeare in the Park" productions. The meeting led to Ronstadt's casting in The Pirates of Penzance, a Gilbert and Sullivan operetta later made into a movie. The play, which was a considerable success, afforded her the change in career direction she'd been hoping for.

Did the Colette book sent by an unknown admirer help prod her in a direction she was meant to go? Or was it only chance? 

A hundred push-ups

Here's an incredibly trivial and meaningless coincidence that I mention only because things like this happen to me a lot, and disproportionately involve TV shows. 

Last night I crumpled up a piece of paper and prepared to toss it into a wastebasket. Before throwing it, I said to myself, "If I miss this shot, I have to do one hundred push-ups." 

I don't know what made me think of this. I've never thought of it before. Nor was I serious; I'm sure I cannot do a hundred push-ups.

Anyway, I made the shot.

Shortly afterward, while fixing dinner, I watched an old episode of How I Met Your Mother. In the episode, Marshall joins a gym, and a tyrannical trainer orders him to do one hundred push-ups. He thinks she's joking, because "Nobody can do a hundred push-ups." But she's not joking, and he must attempt it (he fails). 

As I said: incredibly trivial and meaningless. But because these events happen a lot, I've come to think of them as examples of "information leakage." It's as if what we call "the present" is actually broader and more elastic than we realize, and at times, especially when the mind is wandering, we can pick up on things that are not part of the tiny slice of "the present" that we consciously perceive.