This is theoretically a humor blog, but what I'm writing about today is not funny like a comedy routine, it's more funny like feeling a cold hand slip around your throat when you are alone watching "The Ring". Last fall, a couple days in advance of a trip to LA, I quickly grabbed a book of Elmore Leonard short stories at the used book store. I also hastily put some random songs on my iPod just before leaving. As the plane took off I started reading a story in the book. Then I turned on my iPod and set it to shuffle the songs. The first song was by Todd Snider and as a character in the book got fired and said, "I was looking for a job when I found this one", Todd, sang those exact words in the song by the same name.
A month or so later I was reading a book which mentioned a certain old movie and movie at exactly the same moment that a commercial came on AE for that same movie. Shortly thereafter I read something in a magazine while listening to a song that happened to contain the same line. (I don't have the details of these - I should have written them down).
Last night I was catching up on some old New Yorker magazines I skipped last year and randomly took out the 10/13/08 issue. As I was reading, an ad for "The Graveyard Book" (which I had never heard of) caught my eye. As I flipped by that page, my laptop, sitting open next to me caught my eye; I had a new email showing that someone commented on my blog. The person was a first time commenter and I clicked the link to her blogger home page. I scanned down her profile and listed first on her "favorite books" was "The Graveyard Book."
Today at lunch I read an article on MSNBC about the lack of odd characters these days in major league baseball. As I thought about the characters I had watched growing up I first thought of Mark "the Bird" Fidrych. I got home and found out that Mark died today.
So these are, to me, some really bizarre coincidences of randomly crossing things. The REALLY strange thing to me is, why am I so often trying to read and watch TV or listen to music at the same time? Despite the oddness of these incidents, I don't think they mean anything. Or do they? What is the universe trying to tell me?
2 comments:
Today I sat in my car in the Walmart parking lot, with the heater blowing full force, and a lady pulled up and parked in front of me. The very strong smell of her cigarette smoke wafted into the cab of my car, just as a commercial came on the radio for some Smoker's Lounge, exclaiming, "we're not just blowing smoke!"
Good one :-)
and, true, they are not just blowing smoke, they are sucking it into their lungs to hasten their demise.
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