Jesus I can't believe the quarantine days have dragged on for over 2 freaking years now with no sign of truly ending entirely. One can only hope we'll see something like normalcy soon but since we're hitting that insane 24 month milestone, I thought maybe it wasn't the worst time to wrap up a fun project I launched pretty much right at the starting point of the barely leaving the house era. I've been paying closer attention to synchronicities ever since I started writing a social media dream/liminal vision journal all the way back in 2013, which is how I stumbled on the concept of technological synchromysticism in the first place mind you.
Then COVID hit and so did a couple of predictably baffling syncs so I thought to myself, what on earth else do I have to do at the moment that's better than tracking this fun stuff in more detail than ever? It's been a thing and even though I've been documenting and contemplating synchronicities for years, really digging in did in fact bring a few aspects of the phenomenon into focus in ways I hadn't considered before. Aspects like:
I Can Seemingly Will Synchronicities Into Existence Simply by Focusing on Them
This is basic magick stuff, but there were a few periods over the last 2 years when they simply weren't happening. And no, I've spent years practicing the art of paying attention to these sort of connective tissue mini-events, they simply weren't going down. Which is to say that it's not like they were happening and I was forgetting about them, they weren't happening and they seemingly weren't happening simply because a part of me lost focus on wanting them to happen. During one of these periods, when I realized I wasn't thinking about them after one finally hit, I wrote about it and in doing so triggered a rapid series of the things.
Conversely, while I was in the process of rounding up 2020's best provable synchronicities and minorly disappointed with the results, I then immediately noticed one that had been hiding in plain sight for several years. Not long after, I captured the finest series of syncs ever caught "on tape" as it were. It was very much like they were responding to my direct attention to the topic or lack thereof. As I labeled the phenomenon at the time:
When you engage the strangeness, the strangeness engages you.
How far this ability could be pushed is most definitely something that could be tested and explored moving forward, which might just be a fabulous trick but moving on.
A Crapton of These Involve Music in Some Capacity, Most of Them Really
It should surprise no one that most of the synchronicities happening to a psychedelic musician/11th level music dork would involve tasty tasty jams but wow, nearly all of them do. Now, do I think that if you were super into snowboarding or writing code, most of them would involve that? I'm guessing probably, but on the other hand there is something supremely transcendent about sound. Calculatedly manipulating consciousness by conjoining psychoactive chemicals and sound has in fact been a mystical staple since the beginning of time. So it's possible it might be easier to ride a sync wave of epic guitar drone than it is fresh powder or math equations.
That's purely theoretical but there's certainly something about how western technology has warped consciousness. The last 70 odd years of recorded music is currently pretty much all at our fingertips and wow is that an unfathomably vast interconnected plot structure that's constantly referencing itself. All consciousness is part of a continuum after all, which is what all of this was seemingly reminding me. Your memories and experiences are as constructed by your record collection as they are anything else if you grew up when I did. Some people go to psychedelic therapy, some melt into their stereos, which brings me to my next point.
There's Often an Anti-Structural Element to These Occurrences
Now this is an aspect of the phenomenon that had in fact never occurred to me before but it eventually became undeniable and it goes like this: Something happens that disrupts my intended behavior and that's what leads directly to a head scratching synchronicity. So I'm planning on doing one thing, this plan is diverted by the randomness of the universe, then I stumble on a mind frying sync because of the change. I could speculate on why this is at length but in a general sense, it seemed to be to point out to me that I'm not in charge.
It's one thing to contemplate UFO's, another to contemplate the idea that a higher cosmic intelligence is writing reality itself and that this cosmic intelligence is also you somehow. Not the tiny primate version of you, but the part attached to the connective tendrils of the far out astral light show above and within.
And look, I do have a background in academic psychology. I'm not tracking these things for my own benefit really (although as I just established, I have learned a few things). I'm tracking them as a means of testing a hypothesis. For centuries it's been speculated that engaging in alternative spiritual practices can lead to an increase in synchronous experiences and for me it absolutely did.
My life has been like this since roughly 2006 when I went lucid and started actively engaging with psychedelic sorcery. Now in a lot of cases I can straight up prove that I'm not making this up as you'll see. I'm just qualitatively verifying an ancient claim that's always been a part of the human story, one that's treated as if it can't possibly be more than mere coincidence or delusion.
This sort of strange will challenge anyone who's raised in western society but you've got to understand, for me to reject what's right in front of my face would involve throwing all reason and logic out the window in favor of conflict free mental conformity. Some of us can sit on the fence of conventional flat mind consciousness psychology, others understand the flaws in that super popular dominator philosophy because it's directly contradicted by their day to day existence. You'll see what I'm getting at here, so sit back and enjoy the ride:
In early March just before the pandemic went full blown I watched the film The End of the Tour about David Foster Wallace who isn’t someone I was remotely familiar with up to that point and am not even a fan of (although I absolutely think it’s a great film). A couple days later, after watching a few lectures, I have this experience where I essentially channel his loneliness. In retrospect I realize this probably had more to do with the collective loneliness COVID was going to wreak more than tapping into his internal social alienation.
Truth: I wasn’t smart enough to grok this on my own but caught it when it was pointed out to me in a similar feeling follow up dream a few weeks down the road. What’s important though is that I had this experience on March 2nd, but didn’t get around to writing about or posting it until March 17th on some intuitive level. Then, on that exact day, the freaking NBA podcast that I listen to constantly just so happened to mention him briefly (of all places), which is the only time I can remember him ever coming up in that context. Totally confirmable.
They were discussing the one book you’d draft as your quarantine book and one of the hosts says he was thinking about choosing Infinite Jest but decided against it when he remembered why he’d stopped reading the thing in the first place. I mention this because he’s clearly not much of a fan so it’s not something he’d typically be talking about at all. Here are the receipts on that.
April 2020:
Early this month I finally started listening to the latest Guided By Voices album that dropped last October only to realize, wait, GBV releases like 3 albums a year every year and the last one they released right before this madness just so happens to be called Sweating the Plague? Yup. So that's trippy in itself but it's doubly trippy due to the fact that I rarely buy albums that I don't listen to for months but I bought that and then didn't actually get around to listening to the thing until I'm sweating a plague on an almost literal level (if you're using sweating in the slang sense).
Gets even weirder because out of absolute nowhere I found myself obsessing over the 90’s band Course of Empire, even listening to all 3 of their albums in succession while writing one night only to do some digging and unearth the fact that the last unreleased song they wrote together and performed live as a close out to their final show is entitled Creatures in Quarantine. Wow.
April 22nd, 2020 -
I post about Robert Anton Wilson and the 23 phenomenon on social media in relation to the 90's Bulls documentary The Last Dance, then I get busy at work so I don't have time to look back at the comments until the next morning. When I do, it's apparently been 23 hours since most of the people chimed in and so the number 23 is now staring back at me on like 15 different replies. You can read all about that here.
May 2020:
Run to the corner store and throw my iPod on shuffle. The only song that comes up during this quick trip is by Jesse Sykes and the Sweet Hereafter. Come home and less than an hour later I hear my wife blaring music upstairs as she’s cooking dinner and am like, wait, is that Jesse Sykes and the Sweet Hereafter? Answer: Yes. I’m used to this shit but even I was sort of jarred by that.
A few days later an old friend e-mails me about a new album he’s just put out. I read it at work but don’t have time to respond. After work I eat dinner and take a shower. As I’m coming downstairs to finally reply to this e-mail, my wife’s watching a competitive cooking show where the dish they’re trying to outdo each other with is a Hot Brown. Why is this weird? Because the original name of the exact doom/drone project my friend e-mailed me about was Hot Brown. He changed it like 15 years ago and I never knew that was an actual thing, let alone a specialty melted cheese sandwich native to Kentucky. As it turns out, neither did he and named it after coffee at Denny's when I asked. Again, I’m used to this shit but wow.
As an update to this that I'm just realizing I can prove, not long after the sync mentioned above, this same friend was trying to get me to work on a long distance project with him but I was in the middle of a couple other things and my gear was still in my friends studio in the midst of the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone (remember that?). Anyway, we needed to get together so I could grab my pedal board and we could do some recording but it took a while to set that all up. So I told him, yeah, let's do this thing in a few months when I'm slowing down and actually have my rig.
Because of scheduling, this takes a bit longer than anticipated. I sent him a text saying it was supposed to happen in early August but it got delayed to the 30th and I hadn't gotten back to him about it yet as I did mention it might take a sec. Then, he texts me to follow up at the exact time I'm doing the exact thing he's asking about. Am I just saying that happened? Nope. Here's me telling him I'm supposed to grab my gear on August 9th.
Here's me actually doing the thing I said was going to happen on August 9th on August 30th kicking off at just about 2pm:
And here he is following up at 3pm, right while I was in the middle of doing the exact thing he's asking about.
To dig into this connective thread a little deeper, we have in fact been getting together virtually and working on material for nearly a year and a half at this point, some of which should be out soon enough. If you like psychedelic sci fi video game soundtrack music sounding shit, then you're in luck. Anyway, like a lot of people I'd never even considered remote jamming with someone before a global pandemic hit, but the free software works just well enough to make it doable. Not optimal but operational and this is only odd because even though I met him in Seattle he now lives in Redwood City, California...which just so happens to be the Bay Area suburb where both of my parents grew up. Not just the Bay Area, but Redwood City specifically. My musician uncle still lives there.
7/18/2020 –
I am for at least a week consumed with the idea that I need to listen to the Alcohol Funnycar album Time to Make the Donuts. This is honestly quite odd as it’s a disc I’d either lost or was stolen long ago and had even pulled up on YouTube a few years back, just to determine that it wasn’t super essential honestly. A decent but not exceptional mostly unknown relic of 90’s Seattle melodic angst. But again, I’m for some reason just consumed with the idea I need to listen to this thing again, which is a sensation that feels almost like a periodic rotating black cloud floating just beneath the surface of my waking consciousness.
So I finally do and am mostly of the same opinion but I also wonder, even if I wanted to throw them a few bucks to buy this to satiate my nostalgia, could I even find it anywhere? The answer to that question is apparently no but in seeking out that answer I realized something incredibly strange, which is that AFC had just recorded their first song in 23 years back in May to draw attention to how much the music business is fucked because of COVID. I watch the thing and because all this happens at the one point in the week where I’m a bit drunk, shit makes me weep uncontrollably. I mean, it’s really good, just god does this situation suck for that industry.
The morning this happened I just so happened to be reading a section from a Colin Wilson biography about his interest in psychometry and this is def getting into some, what, psychogeographical phonomantic territory I guess? It’s fun to come up with words. Very fascinating that social distancing has sort of forced me to notice how I’m picking up on odd telepathic ripples in the recorded history of sound.
As a matter of fact, last month I had this spontaneous realization that I’d unconsciously ever so slightly rewritten the end riff to Hum’s Stars in a Chapel Supremesus track while walking my dogs, which I had absolutely never noticed before. I spent a decent amount of time thinking about how funny this is stoned and then 3 days later learned they’d just surprise dropped their first album in 22 years (which is phenomenal). Just another episode.
Then on July 20th I have this vision that I post on social media on July 22nd:
When this happens I immediately think of the Bruce Lee “be water” mantra which I’d never even heard of until a documentary on his life of the same name dropped a few months prior. What’s synchronous here is that the very next day, on July 23rd (because of course), I ended up watching a documentary called A Kid From Coney Island on Netflix, which shows that exact clip roughly twice in the last 20 minutes as a closer. Absolutely confirmable via my FB post and my Netflix browsing history. Check it.
10/8/2020 –
Just straight up one of the trippiest synchronicities I’ve ever experienced and I’m entirely used to this sort of thing. So I catch an ad on YouTube about an upcoming Mr. Bungle digital performance in Eureka, California which leads me to finally watching the whole video for that new/old song they released a few months back. I’m honestly not that into it but afterward I decide to do my typical weekly iTunes shuffle meditation/divination thing. When I do the first song that comes up is a Fantomas track (another Mike Patton project), which is fascinating but just sort of par the course in its own right. I go through the typical weekly “randomized” three song meditation sesh while projecting imaginal worlds inwardly (as I’m prone to do). The 3rd and final song that comes up is Cornflake Girl with its famous refrain of “This is not real, this is not really happ-e-ne-hang! You bet your life it is!”
And with that I pull myself out of the depths but while looking back at the 3 song titles in order to glean a potential deeper meaning (as I’m also prone to do), I realize the Fantomas song that played is from their first disc and entitled Book 1 Page 19. It takes me a sec to go, wait, I’m releasing the final book in a trilogy in a few months, let me go back to book 1 of that trilogy and see what’s on page 19. And with that I dig up the thing and flip to the appropriate page, read all the way to near the end of the final paragraph without seeing any huge significance until…? Good Christ, this is the ONLY place in my writing anywhere where I mention the band Mr. Bungle, as I’m quite briefly telling the story of an acid sound experiment I did after dosing at a show on their California tour with an ex-girlfriend in Columbus. The holy shit factor there is so freaking off the charts. Just jarring.
10/20-10/21/2020 –
End up working slightly late and log out with a weird compulsion to listen to the song Rave Down by Swervedriver. So I throw on that song while I’m taking a few pre-dinner bong rips, listen to only that song and head upstairs. The very next day I stumble on an article in Brooklyn Vegan about a new shoegaze-y band, that just so happens to give a 2 paragraph write up of the song Rave Down. Not the album, not the band, just that fucking song. The exact one I had a strange compulsion to listen to after work the night before. Odds of reading an article with a 2 paragraph break down of the song Rave Down (which came out in 1991) published in the year 2020? Essentially zero.
While doing my iPod shuffle divination thing later that night, the final track that comes up is a Sonic Youth track from the Destroyed Rooms B-sides album I’ve barely listened to. This is trippy because I just so happen to have listened to more Sonic Youth in the last week than I have in a while, as I’ve been trying to finally connect with both Sonic Nurse and Rather Ripped. I’ve owned those albums for years but just hadn’t put in the necessary work. They're both great as I expected. But the real trippy thing is that after looking back at the song titles, I realize that the first was Philip Jose Farber by Bloodhag.
I of course then have to inquire, who is Philip Jose Farber exactly? Well, apparently a sci fi author most famous for including sexual and spiritual themes in his work. Sounds about right. Oh, and Hawkwind have a track named after one of his books, which it turns out is quite good.
October 27th, 2020 –
The iTunes shuffle divination sync storm continues. Just explaining this is baffling honestly. So the second track out of 3 that comes up while I’m in this trance is by Bomb20, who are a digital hardcore act from the 90’s. This leads my mind to wander a bit and start thinking about how just the other week I found myself browsing through the Ipecac Records Bandcamp page and how in doing so I realized there was a second Curse of the Golden Vampire album that I didn’t know existed (they’re another digital hardcore act if you’re not getting the connection). This leads me to contemplate how Robert Pollard put out a Circus Devils album on Ipecac back in the day (Sgt. Disco) and how I’ve owned that album for over a decade and listened to it like twice. What’s the next song that comes up in shuffle? A song from that EXACT FUCKING ALBUM. Odds? Roughly 32 in 22,000 or 0.0015%.
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