January 2021:
While I was rounding up the prior year's technologically provable syncs, I stumbled on one that had been sitting right in front of my face for years. In 2019, after I'd finished the last Black Science album, I threw all the audio files I deemed relevant to the project in a folder, backed it up on a couple different hard drives and promptly forgot about it. Then while writing about the topic of verifiable syncs I accidentally hovered my mouse over the folder long enough to notice that the thing contains 6.66 gigabytes of data. Spooky, and if you think I did this on purpose you're insane. You can check out the screenshots here.
March 12, 2021:
I capture 2 spectacularly weird syncs in one day. A longtime reader introduces me to an old friend who's recently moved to Seattle via social media. I send him a friend request and the very first post of his that shows up in my feed involves an album he just put out named Eschatology. This is very odd because I played in a band that put out an album called Eschatology in the early 2000's. What are the odds of that being the first post of his that shows up in my feed right after we're introduced right? The timing there is baffling and I can in fact prove that this happened.
Then a few hours later, I'm catching up to a DM thread about a dream another longtime reader mentioned to me about a man with snake like arms. I had no idea what this meant and told her as much but in doing divination techniques with my book Transmissions from Outside of Time not long after, she opened up to a "random" page where I mention the band These Arms Are Snakes, who I hadn't thought of in a while honestly. Now the dream imagery seems to involve bizarro pre-cognition.
Because she mentions this, roughly an hour later I wonder if These Arms Are Snake's guitar player's project Dust Moth had put out any new material lately. Answer: They had just released their first album in 5 years...that fucking day. No shit and I have the receipts on all of it.
April 27th, 2021:
I find myself going down a rabbit hole involving Amorphous Androgynous remixes of Noel Gallagher's High Flying Birds, who are a band I had never listened to in my life (and honestly still haven't outside of the remixes). Then 2 days later 2 different websites that I read regularly post about this exact band. As I mentioned at the time, it's not the most compelling sync in my mind, but Brooklyn Vegan hadn't mentioned Gallagher's project in nearly a decade and Pitchfork hadn't said a thing about them in 3 years leading up to this. I can also essentially prove it happened.
May 10th 2021 -
I realized I'd forgotten to post this anywhere but on this day I read an article about Cannibal Ox where EL-P mentions a premonition he had on MDMA (and then forgot) about the Twin Towers coming down. Apparently his friend had to remind him about it and play him the voicemail. This is only synchronous because later that day I read an article and then dig up a video about an artist named David Mandell who famously dreamt about the World Trade Center's demise, painted it, then took a picture of himself with the painting in front of a public business listing the date, which was in his case on September 11th of 1996, making the whole thing even more eerie.
The guy was essentially doing technological synchromysticism years before me and can I confirm this happened. Yep.
Here's me reading the Cannibal Ox story at 11am
Here I am digging into David Mandell at 5:30pm
So just that thing where you unintentionally read about 2 completely different artists who had premonitions about 9/11 on the same day, in the year 2021.
If you're read through the entire synchronicity round up thread (here), you'd remember that I mentioned there was a point where I didn't experience any for an extended period. This would be that point. From about May 2021 all the way through late August, I do not remember any synchronicities of note. Then one happened, I wrote about it, and they promptly started flowing again. The realization that I'd sort of lost focus on them seemed to lead to their direct materialization in my subjective microverse. That's what I'm about to get into here.
Late August 2021:
The first one’s more of an iPod shuffle divination thing, as in this case I had just read an article on Magnet magazine’s website about how the Connells are putting out their first new album in 20 years. The Connells are a band I hadn't had a single thought about in at least that amount of time which makes the random nostalgia of the revelation amuse the shit out of me. Then the next day I do my prototypical 3 song iPod shuffle divination thing and what comes up as track number 2? The freaking Connells. I own one of their albums total. Sometimes even I’m stunned by this stuff even as regular an occurrence as it is in my life and this would be one of those occasions. To hammer the point home with a wink, the third track that now turns up is by my Bush era metaphysical rant metal project. A part of my consciousness is the freaking computer, that’s why this stuff happens and the whole focus of the exercise.
The other incident of note involved me getting off working from home and then heading out to get some wine and dinner. First I stop to get the wine all the while listening to my iPod but when I get back in the car the tunes are suddenly frozen. Because the ancient tech sound machine now won’t work I’m forced to listen to crap radio which I’d be mad about if it was a longer drive. Also, I can’t find KEXP in my saved stations for completely unknown reasons (I had to add it back in later) so I pull up like KISW (which is the “classic rock” station meaning anything legacy music industry at this point I guess).
I hear some Come As You Are on the way to the Taco Time but the trippy part is that at the exact second I pull behind another car into the drive through line a voice suddenly asks:
“Welcome to Taco Time, can I take your order?”
I’m super stoned so actually mildly confused for a brief moment. Like, wait a minute, there’s another car in front of me, what…the…? Oh, it’s an ad on the radio that starts with a dude asking to take my Taco Time order, that just so happened to come on at the exact freaking second I pulled into a Taco Time drive through. Fun, but what I personally love are the peculiar tech malfunctions that set the whole thing in motion. Both my iPod had to break, then KEXP had to be mysteriously wiped from my saved stations for this shit to go down like it did.
Weed loves you and here’s where it gets meta. I was just writing about how I hadn’t engaged this stuff in a while, and I did just that in writing about those notable incidents, didn’t I? Well, roughly 3 days after I wrote about the prior 2 syncs, I had a sync transpire that was essentially a combination of the other 2. Fantastically weird.
This time I drive to go pick up some food again listening to my iPod. After I get back in the car, the thing then starts playing but the Aesop Rock track I was listening to fast delay echoes out of control. Very over the top glitch style outro sounding, almost like the time diluting reverberations of a whippit high. Then it goes radio silent for like 20 seconds and comes back on playing albums at complete random.
It’s actually done this before and the thing is, when it resets like this I have no idea what order it’s putting the songs in because it makes no logical sense. It just starts playing albums in some odd sequence that I’ve never been able to decipher that always starts with this one techno album. I have never really delved into where it would go after that.
The thing is, I don’t want to listen to that techno album and I’m driving so I click the forward song button on my steering wheel 10 times or so to get to the next one. That one’s I think like an old Meshuggah disc so I’m like, nah, not in the mood and proceed to click another 10 times. What’s now coming through my speakers?
The fucking Connells.
I recommend reading the rest of that article here, as I then start talking about some meditative pre-cog experiences, which I suppose I don't really consider synchronicities but are beyond fascinating and in a different category all together.
September 2021:
I watch an animated movie called Superman vs. the Elite and make a joke on social media about how dated the catchphrase "Truth, Justice, and the American way" is. Nobody thinks this is funny but almost exactly a month later DC officially changes the damn phrase. That's all documented here.
October 2021:
I'm kind of drunk and I realize that not only have I never written about this baffling sync before but it's also entirely provable. Here's the short version (you can read the long version here):
I accidentally moved to the neighborhood of Seattle largely settled by people of Nordic heritage, right next a street that bares the same somewhat rare name of my Nordic grandfather (Earl) who worked in the moving industry. On the corner closest to me on the street with the same name as my Nordic grandpa, there just so happens to be a small moving company. Of course, all of this is confirmable and would have been even before the internet due to basic bookkeeping practices.
This sync actually got a bit deeper when in March of 2022 I took a DNA test and realized that on a genetic level, I'm basically half Nordic. 42% Swedish, 6% Norwegian. That all comes from my grandpa Earl as far as I know and not remotely what I was expecting.
Then on October 22nd, on the exact day the new Dune film dropped and everyone was talking about it, I found myself playing a video game where I'm exploring the innards of a massive sandworm. I highly recommend the game Sable by the way, but what you've got to understand is that I think it took me 20 odd hours to clear the map in that thing and you can do it in any order you want. I'd been playing it for several weeks and had zero clue there was an explorable sandworm but that's the mission I intuitively decided to take on at the exact moment in history when everyone was freaking out about Dune. I didn't actually watch the new movie until several weeks later. Solid but please, not even close to as good as the Lynch masterpiece. Obvs.
November 2021:
While meditating before getting out of bed I find myself randomly thinking about Hamilton Morris. About an hour later I look at Twitter and one of the first things that comes up in my feed is Erik Davis tweeting about how HM had just joined the super creepy Compass Pathways. My exact thoughts on this are:
"I typically wouldn't expect much from a nepotism kid."
Then later that night I watch the HBO Max Theranos documentary which briefly features who? Hamilton Morris's famous dad. There is a tech trail on that if you're curious. I will say though that thinking about Errol Morris for the first time in years, then accidentally watching a documentary that he’s briefly in = wow!
December 2021:
I listen to a podcast that talks about the NBA halftime performance act Christian and Scooby extensively, then later that week my wife texts me a clip of Christian and Scooby. That absolutely happened.
A few weeks later while driving back from the coast my wife's playing Echo and the Bunnymen's greatest hits. While this is happening I go out of my way to comment on how Voyager One's cover of Bedbugs and Ballyhoo is exactly what a cover should be as it's putting a distinctively unique spin on the original. I'm mentioning this precisely because I hadn't hear the E & B version in ages. Then what comes up as track 5 when I put my iTunes on shuffle the next day? Voyager One's cover of Bedbugs and Ballyhoo.
January 2022:
I don't quite remember the date but while walking our dogs on our lunch break one day my wife and I joked about how we both never actually clean up our computer desktops properly and lazily just throw all the files in a folder to promptly forget about them. I wasn't even aware she also did this when it came up. Then later that night, in wiping down my desk she somehow accidentally moved my desktop junk folder into my recycle bin where I then accidentally deleted it. So on the day I'm joking about how I always half ass clean up my desktop, I accidentally delete all the junk files I'd pointlessly stored for the first time ever. I only lost 1 thing of semi-value in doing so too, almost hammering home the point of:
"Why do you keep this shit?"
I wasn't even 100% sure how this happened until roughly a week later when my wife accidentally moved another desktop folder into the recycle bin while wiping down my Surface Pro. This is a phenomenon that happened a total of twice in the period of roughly a week and has never happened ever again.
Also, on Friday January 21st I finish a song called The Legend of Hopscotch B'Gosh. Then on the 23rd I download the Blinker the Star album A Bourgeois Kitten, which features quite possibly the only song I know of that starts with the word hopscotch. That's a fact. A very strange fact.
February 2022:
I find myself thinking about the film Mandy while walking my dogs around the neighborhood, then the next morning it's on the splash page suggestions for my Google Chromecast, where it never appears again. This is trippy because for a few seconds I'm thinking it's a targeted ad before I realize that no, I never did anything other than think about this film in depth because of it's ties to a local band I'd been listening to. Never searched a thing anywhere or said it out loud.
Later in the month I find myself unintentionally listening to the album Hypermodern Jazz 2000.5 and contemplating how the only reason I remembered the existence of the thing had to do with another metal band using the exact same cover art 20 years later. I can't even remember the band's name but later I'm sort of drunk and accidentally download an album from a PR e-mail called Timewave Zero. It isn't until I start listening to the thing that I realize, wait, Blood Incantation? Isn't that the band with the Hypermodern Jazz art? Answer: Yes. You can read more about those 2 syncs here.
And with that, we're all caught up. All the synchronicities I've tracked since the dawn of the COVID era rounded up in convenient chronological order. Don't let them tell you nothing good comes from boredom. Also, back to the hypothesis we're testing here, which is?
Does a devotion to alternate spiritual disciplines lead to an increase in synchronous connective psi tissue experiences? You tell me champ. It's almost like the fundamentalist materialism our society worships as wisdom is mostly some flat mind society bullshit. Nah, it can't be that. This stuff is probably just all "coincidence". Sure it is.
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