Endlessly Infinite Coincidence

Last Summer, while on vacation, I experienced the musical/literary coincidence of hearing the title line in the song “I Was Looking For a Job When I Found This One” at the exact moment that I read that sentence in an unrelated book.

My recent Spring vacation now has its own musicliterary coincidence, though this is more of a stretch.

While we were in Carmel, we stumbled upon a quaint little restaurant (they really need to repair the sidewalk outside their front door). We went in to check it out and I was surprised to see, on the hostess stand of Carmel’s “most romantic restaurant”, CDs of the soundtrack from “The Endless Summer” for sale.

Now, the name “The Endless Summer” may sound romantic but, if so, you are confusing it with “A Summer Place”, a sappy soap opera of a film that teen girls watched while their boyfriends were fantasizing about riding waves around the world instead of their girlfriends.

I was pretty young when both of those came out – still learning about love and sex from New Yorker cartoons - but while my older sister mooned over Troy Donahue in “A Summer Place”, I developed a crush on global beaches. For a major milestone birthday I had a couple years ago, I put my “Endless Summer” DVD on repeat during the entire party.

I am not sure when we saw "A Summer Place". Our mother would not allow us to go to "Gidget" or the "Beach Blanket" films or any movies involving co-ed teens in bathing suits because Parents Magazine did not approve of them. I have digressed, but I added this in the interest of full disclosure, which is what I think Parents and my mother were afraid was happening in those bikini movies but was not.

Back to the coincidence: The Casanova restaurant was opened by Belgian, Walter Georis, who wrote the music for “The Endless Summer” along with his brother Gaston. (The surf music tradition is now carried on by Nico and Max).

Okay, we get the serendipitous music discovery, JohnnyB, where does the book part of this musicliterary coincidence referred to in your Endless Blog Post come in?

Hold on!

Upon returning from our trip, my sister put up a post about “Infinite Summer”, which challenges people to read some book called “Infinite Jest" over the Summer. Get it? “Infinite Summer” = “Endless Summer”, right? What? I told you it was a stretch.

And That's When Things Got Weird

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?