Catalogue of Serial Events

1) Christmas Day Night, I don't know what year. I'm guessing that it was 2001, although Hog would certainly know better than I would. We went to Patrick Molloy's to celebrate the birth of Christ with our Jewish friends. Was the devil himself, Justin Miller, there too, or am I mixing up separate nights at the same venue? Somebody made a special appearance that night. Maybe it was just Gay Talbott. At any rate, there was a large group of us drinking rusty nails in earnest, and a group of younger girls showed up at some point. They had gone to highschool with us, and had apparently been freshmen when we were seniors, but I didn't recognize any of them. I blacked out at some point, and when I unblacked out, I was standing on the corner of Pier Avenue, trying to hitchhike home. I have no idea why. That is the first and last time that I've ever tried that. It was a weird thing to do especially because I was in such a conspicuous place. I mean, the police park their cars right there in that intersection. I can think of only a handful of better ways to get thrown in jail, and of course, at some point or another in my life, I've tried each of those too. But whenever I think back to that night, I'm never quite sure that I was actually hitchhiking. It seems to me that maybe I just made eye contact with the driver of the car, and she pulled over to pick me up. At any rate, the driver of the car was Susannah Bayles. I had never spoken a word to her before, but she had been one of the girls in the bar that night. I asked her if she'd give me a ride home, and she said she would. I sat down in the passenger seat, and it wasn't long before this strange, quite distinct feeling came over me. I liked this girl. A lot. But not in a sexual way. I liked her in a way that I'd never liked a girl before. My instinct was to ask for her phone number so that she could hang out with us again. I asked for it, and I think I must have even framed it in that exact context. I'll have to ask her if she remembers it that way. Asking her that will be particularly easy for me to do because she is now my best friend's wife. Unbeknownst to me, earlier that night, they had gotten together with each other for the first time. Susannah is still one of my favorite people. She always has been, from the very first moment that I met her. What is so strange is that I feel exactly the same way towards her now as I did that very first night-- that, and it's also surprising that I didn't try to get in her pants that night, which would have made the rest of my life a little more weird than it already is. But this result might have been on account of serendipity and not synchronicity. Still, whenever I have put myself in that context, 999 times out of 1000, I have acted without any sense of decency. This time was that sole remaining one. If you don't believe me, ask Swain. He can vouch for my reliability. And so, in conclusion, I am including this event in my seriality catalogue just because the odds of it happening randomly are beyond chance-- so far beyond chance that I cannot help but impute meaning to what otherwise might be considered nothing more than a nice coincidence.

2) The night before, I had dreamt something about my cousin Mandy, (white trash name, I know: her father was named Wayne; her brothers, Marty and Mitchell) and had spent a good part of my morning wondering when the last time was that she had appeared in one of my dreams. After racking my brain for awhile, I decided that she had never done so. That evening, when I got home from work, I walked into my dad's room (I still live with him; don't worry about it: you weren't going to sleep with me anyway,) and he said, "Mandy called. Your Aunt Judy has dementia." His statement hit me as if it were a wall; I couldn't take another step forward, and I couldn't think of anything appropriate to say.

3) The night before, I had dreamt that I tore my hamstring. I fell down and rolled around on the dirt of the track, or was it grass? It had switched back and forth on me, or at least, any time I try to remember the dream, I am acutely unable to keep it straight. In the dream, I was participating in some kind of sporting event, and I tore my hamstring-- this much I know for sure. That evening, I went to El Tarasco to eat dinner. I usually take my Tarasco orders to go, but that night, I sat in the back room and watched the College World Series. The game was Florida vs. somebody else. In the third inning, Florida's starting pitcher was in the middle of delivering a pitch when he tore his hamstring; he went tumbling down the dirt mound and onto the infield grass.

4) Fuj's baseball team would be playing in the CIF Championship at Angel Stadium the following day, and I went to bed, excited about getting one more chance to watch the team play. That night, I dreamt that a girl sat down in front of me and borrowed my Florida baseball cap. She was sitting in front of me at a particular angle that I couldn't explain. If she was going to sit, facing me, then how could she possibly watch the baseball game? She had blonde, curly hair, and looked familiar, and I was happy; although I didn't exactly have the feeling of being sexually attracted to her. There was some other connection between us, but I was just as happy as I could possibly be, and she was there, contributing to that. The next day, at the game, Carianne appeared out of nowhere, and called my name out from the end of our row. I immediately recognized her as the girl in my dream, even before I recognized her as Carianne (She was wearing sunglasses, and I hadn't seen her in five years or more.) She sat down behind me, and when I turned around to talk to her, she was sitting in the exact same position that she had been sitting in the night before. She was sitting "in front of me" because I was turning around to look at her. I thought of the dream. She wasn't asking to borrow my Florida hat. I hadn't been able to find it that morning, and she was already wearing a baseball cap of her own. It was still relatively early in the game, but as I turned back around in my chair to look at the field, it hit me with full certainty: Fuj's team is going to win this game, and this is going to be one of the happiest days of my life. I keep hoping that another fine day will come along to make me even happier, but so far, there hasn't been one, and from where I sit right now, the future doesn't look particularly promising.

5) Tonight, while driving past Cloyden Road and Palos Verdes High School, I got to thinking about Sarah Johnson, and the fact that she used to live on Chelsea Road, and then I took a detour that brought me to how much I've always hated the name, Chelsea, and next I thought of Chelsea D.-- she of the "So what's the deal?" story. Not many people know that one, but it will probably be related at some point here, so I won't refrain from introducing it now-- although I do feel the need to lean towards a pseudonym because it seems to me that the story might border on slander, and you can't go around slandering living people. At any rate, when I got back to the office, I was intending to check my messages, but I somehow managed to punch myself into a maze of recorded explanations when I went to try to figure out which key it was that I could press to go backwards in the hierarchy of menus, and finally, that electronic cunt who always sounds the same regardless of which company is utilizing her services, she wanted to give an example of a would-be answering machine message-- but, wait a second, who in the fuck isn't capable of figuring out what might be said in a typical greeting?-- and so she did, and her example went something like this, "Hi, you've reached Chelsea Jones, and . . ." For the love of God. Just how stupidly can one's life go? This question seems to be gaining relevance lately. I love you, Sarah Johnson.

6) Yesterday, I was replying to an email from Frogas in which my mom's horse had been involved, and I initially started to write that we recently had to put him out to pasture, but then I thought that she might not know what that meant, seeing as English is not her primary language, so I decided instead to write that he was sent to a glue factory. He wasn't. He was sent to Hollywood Park for trainers to ride while ponying racehorses, but that would have been even less appropriate for an email, so I lied, musing silently to myself that I'd never get caught anyway. Then, last night, at dinner, I was reading the tail end of The Castle, and out of the clear blue sky, here comes Kafka, writing, "But if that were so, how could he have hung around there like an animal in pasture?" For the love of God, how can the Fates possibly arrrange things so goddamned well, such that I end up exposing my own miserable lie in an effort to memorialize an otherwise perfectly uninteresting case of synchronicity?

7) Yesterday, I started reading Pierre Et Jean, by Guy de Maupassant. The protagonist, or at least the father of Pierre and Jean, is named Monsieur Roland, which means, of course, that both siblings also share the same family name. In other words, they are all Rolands. I would bet that Pierre ends up being the protagonist in this little novel just because he is an unlikeable character, and Maupassant had a slightly warped mind. At any rate, this morning, I opened Microsoft Outlook, and in my Inbox was a spam email with a subject line of "Roland." This isn't the first time that such a thing has happened with spam. I've noticed before that spam tends to beget synchronicity.

8) Dave Brubeck's Take Five.

I had heard this classic only a handful of times in my life, but I was vaguely familiar with it, and so, when I heard it playing in a Japanese restaurant, I recognized it immediately, and began to wonder intensely whose song it was. I was under the impression that the restaurant was playing music off the Internet, and so I asked the waitress if she could find out the name of the song and who was the artist, and she said that she would, whereupon she turned and made a beeline for the kitchen and the computer therein. Unfortuately, a customer stopped her to ask a question about the menu, and the initial question spawned what seemed like an unending stream of questions. The customer was a very demanding Japanese man, and the waitress could only manage to send me helpless glances occasionally. She wasn't able to break away from the man. Finally, after he had learned all that there was to learn about the menu, she was dismissed. The song was already winding down as she sprinted into the kitchen, and it ended only a second or two too soon. Unfortunately, the program only shows the information for the song that is currently playing, she explained to me when she came back to my table. Bowing slightly, she offered a sincere apology. She really did look distressed about the whole thing. I said it was no big deal, and left her an especially large tip out of gratitude, and when I left the restaurant, the problem of the song wasn't bothering me at all. But in the coming days, I found that I could not forget about it. Neither could I remember how the song went. So I wouldn't have been able to hum it to anybody for help. By the end of the week, this scenario had me in a state of utter frustration. It just snowballed on me, which is hard to explain. I can only say that it was definitely an existential issue. There was the lack of control, and also, the taste of my mortality. That weekend, my mom and I drove up to Santa Ynez to stay with my aunt. And over brunch on Sunday, I explained these circumstances to her. I can't remember why. A subject must have come up that my mind somehow associated with my quandry, and out it all came. My aunt expressed sympathy, but didn't seem to be too concerned about my situation. My mom and I drove home that afternoon, and on the drive, we listened to the same cds that we had listened to on the way up. By the end of the drive, I could tell that my mom had surpassed her tolerance for my music, and so, while coming down the offramp from the freeway, I decided to turn on the radio just to give her a break. I switched over to the radio, which just happened to be on a jazz station that I had listened to for a few minutes on the drive up. Guess what song was playing: Dave Brubeck's Take Five. Not only was the song playing, but also, they gave the name of the song immediately after it finished. Perhaps the most notable part of this story is that I very rarely listen to that particular radio station because I can't stand the fact that they are perpetually in the midst of a seasonal fundraising drive. There is, however, one admission that I do want to make. I had turned on the jazz station on the drive up because I was hoping explicitly that they would play the song, but after ten minutes of their not playing the song, I had aborted that course of action and had gone back to listening to cds.

9) On Christmas Eve, I was perusing one of my favorite blogs when I came across a list of the worst all-time Christmas songs. Number six on the top ten was Paul McCartney's Wonderful Christmastime. I wondered to myself what the song sounded like. I couldn't remember ever having heard it, but I decided that it must be pretty bad because Paul McCartney is one of a select group of artists (as are the rest of the former Beatles for that matter) who have the uncanny ability to be as bad as they are good. When they are bad, they are really, really bad. That very day, on the drive home, I ejected a cd that was getting to be F'd out, and when I turned on the radio, it was on K-Earth 101, and guess what song was playing . . . that's right, Paul McCartney's Wonderful Christmastime. Certainly one of the ten worst Chrstimas songs ever written. I would have put it in the top five. Again, as with the jazz station that appeared in the anecdote above, I very rarely listen to K-Earth 101. These stations number five and six in my queue of favorite radio stations, and I rarely listen to the radio because I am usually listening to cds, or to my iPod, as the case may be. Now, a critic here would say that I would have considered this to be synchronicity if I had heard any of the ten songs on the list of worst Christmas songs ever, and of course, the critic would emphasize that it is now, after all Christmas time, and so, if I'm ever going to hear any of these songs, it's probably going to happen now. And so maybe this isn't such a strange coincidence after all. To these observations, I reply with the following. First, I didn't even recognize most of the other artists on the list. There were at most three other songs that I would have recognized as being on the list if I had heard them. And second, and more important, I absolutely despise Christmas music, and if I had stopped to think that there was even the remotest chance that such music would be playing on the radio, I wouldn't have turned it on the first place. I was expecting the radio to be on Jack FM, and to my knowledge, they would not under any circumstances play a Christmas song. Thus, the odds of me hearing this song on the very same day that I first learned of its existence, and stopped to wonder how bad it might be, are infintesimal. You cannot even set odds this low because I had probably never heard the song before and I will probably never hear it again. I am very rarely exposed to Chrstimas music and in fact make it a point to flee from any room, or car, or building, or wherever it is that I am trapped if there is Christmas music playing. This particular event was a phenomenal long-shot.