Fall 2022:
So I bought the trilogy of Batman games in a bundle back in January for a whopping $20 with tons of bonus content because I realized I’d only played through Arkham Asylum somehow. I legit just didn’t play a ton of games outside of NBA 2K for roughly 7 years pre-pandemic because honestly I got sort of tired of the level of violence in a lot them. But a global plague kicked me back into the habit and honestly gaming has now become roughly my second favorite pastime outside of geeking out on weed music. Ahhh, it’s nice to not have kids in your 40’s. Much to be written about in the future regarding the spiritual metaphors inherent in creating new and expanding little worlds of consciousness but there’s no time for that here.
What matters is that the last of these games (Arkham Knight), came out in 2015 but I just got around to playing it in October of 2022. While I was playing through it, I had this rather hilarious Batman dream. In it, I was watching the Dark Knight infiltrate the lair of this brand new super villain called The Cathy. Who is The Cathy you ask? Well a criminally insane mastermind played by Ray Liotta who’s convinced he’s the titular character from the newspaper funny pages Cathy comic by Cathy Guisewite. He wandered around his hideout menacingly yelling:
“Ack! Ack! Ack!”
If I’m being honest, if you would have tasked me with coming up with a better Batman villain I would never be able to compete with that. It is a fucking great concept. No notes. But I did think there was probably a deeper metaphorical context to the living linguistic experience. I immediately grokked that Ray Liotta had recently passed away and when I looked up the Cathy strip I realized it had been discontinued back in 2010. So I immediately thought the vision had something to do with death. What I didn’t catch until later though was the significance of the Ray Liotta reference, as when he passed away I was honestly surprised that none of the obits I read mentioned Grand Theft Auto: Vice City, which was clearly the greatest thing Ray Liotta ever did by a long shot. Clearly.
Then, about a week later I’m jamming on some sick guitar riffage with my friend and he brings up the Classic Albums series of music documentaries, which leads me to mention a crazy synchronicity I had all the way back on July 15th and 16th of 2012. On the 15th, which was a Sunday, I was going to work out and needed something to watch so I scanned through Netflix before settling on a Deep Purple Machine Head classic album doc. I didn't even own that album but my main takeaway from the thing was that Jon Lord, the keyboard player for Deep Purple, was fucking phenomenal. Never even heard of the guy before but when I got into work the very next day I learned that he had just died. If I was into technological synchromysticism back then this would have been entirely verifiable via the streaming records but alas I was not.
But I’ve maybe told this story a total of twice in the decade since and somehow I told it on Saturday the 11th, roughly 3 hours before I learned that Kevin Conroy had moved on from our world. Why is this trippy? I never watched more than a few episodes of Batman: The Animated Series. 90% of my exposure to Kevin Conroy came from the Arkham games, 2 of which I’d just played through in the last year. As a matter of fact, I just finished Arkham City on November 4th, a confirmable fact. Kevin Conroy died on the10th.
Then there was the dream of course and this time I got the sync “on tape” so to speak unlike with the Purple. As mentioned, the super duper sync-y part for me isn’t that this happened, but that I was telling another story about a very similar thing happening (that I’ve maybe mentioned twice total in 10 years) right before I found out about it.
That’s the "holy shit" factor from my point of view but of course I’m the one that it happened to. It did make me contemplate it a bit more and these celebrity death syncs have in fact now gone down with me on at least 4 separate occasions, that I can remember at least. There’s the Batman Sync and the Jon Lord sync, but there was also the Type O sync. That was the first one and when I look up the dates it even tracks. With that, on the night Peter Steele died I somehow ended up chatting about Type O Negative for like 10 minutes at band practice with the bassist from Black Science. He brought them up and we were both kind of stunned when we found out he died the next day. You gotta understand, the odds of me having a conversation about Type O Negative are pretty fucking slim as I’ve never been a big fan at all, which made it extra trippy.
The king of all these syncs is the Petty-est though and I’m using the alternate definition of Petty-est here, the one refers to something that most involves Tom Petty. This one I’ve mentioned multiple times and talked about on at least one podcast but to sum it up:
I’m not even that huge a Tom Petty fan, but I’ve always thought Free Fallin’ is roughly the perfect pop song. I could listen to that track a million times and never get truly sick of it. Because of that I tried to write a song sort of like it, just structurally, which I did. I worked on it for over a month on and off and repeatedly listened to Free Fallin’ to get ideas on the arrangement.
I did not plan on it taking me nearly as long as it did to finally finish the writing end of the thing but on the day after I did, I came into work to the news that Tom Petty had died. This experience actually made me cry a little bit at my desk because it was so jarring and I love how in looking up the dates of all these occurrences I’m confirming my memories. That’s absolutely a thing that happened on Monday October 2nd, 2017 and here is the track if you’re curious:
What do I make of all of this? I must say it’s an odd sort of sync but the strange celebrity death sync trick is apparently just part of my repertoire. This is just the first time I’ve managed to catch it on tape. The fact that it involves video game sorcery, which is precisely the thing I’ve been focusing on recently, makes it extra juicy. So what do I make of it? Stoned wizardry works because all consciousness is interconnected. All consciousness is interconnected, which is why stoned wizardry works.
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