Weekend Synchronicities and Affirmations
There are days and weeks like this one that make me love the world for what it gives to the listening.
Last night at Sanctuary goth night (the final such event to be held at the soon-closing dear State House), the DJ played Rob Zombie’s “Dragula,” what I remembered as a reviled and disappointing and un-heavy single when I was a metalhead teenager. Having a crude ear then, I actually couldn’t hear the trajectory between White Zombie’s Astro Creep: 2000 Songs of Love, Destruction, and Other Synthetic Delusions of the Electric Head and this later solo track. Nor, more importantly, at the time did I have a chance to experience the song in its proper environment, on the dance floor of a goth club. It’s a stompy jam.
Earlier in the day, on the tails of my started memoir-inspo Spotify playlist “childhood,” I was revisiting the third Stone Temple Pilots album, Tiny Music...Songs from the Vatican Gift Shop. When I made the decision to buy that CD as a kid, it was based solely on the love of their glorious sophomore album, Purple, and the first heavy-rotation single off the new album. I was so let down by the slower, mellower, overall softer edge from this rock quartet. But now, with wizened ears, I am really coming to love and redemption in hearing anew what the DeLeo brothers crafted around Weiland’s voice.
I love, too, the line-up of the Zombie and STP album names. And more on that name, Astro Creep..., it really recalls for me a tinge of the surrealist premise-heavy comedic influences reverberating in my life over the last week. I rewatched Patton Oswalt’s latest two comedy specials on Netflix (before my subscription gift card ran out), I Love Everything and We All Scream. His closing bit about the Denny’s Grand Slam family is both classic Patton and a perfect imaginarium of the kind of influence on me he has had creatively. I’m thinking about reopening my old, first GMail account so I can track down the story I wrote about a giant squid while working at Webster Bank. L loved giant squids, and it’s wild that I ran into S, one of the gang from R’s bike club, at Sanctuary last night. And of course the squid story is calling to me, reading The Memory of Animals by Claire Fuller all week. That story was written I think at the height of my Tom Waits obsession, who I just ran into again, watching Wristcutters: A Love Story on a whim the other night. He tells his crooked tree/straight tree story, and makes light of all the tiny miracles at his camp.
But the biggest synchronicity of all was on Saturday morning. I met P, in the neighborhood for coffee and bagels, and in our way, we ended up talking about anthropomorphized time, trying to empathize with its desires and wants and dreams and needs in a universe of gravity wells and light-minutes and then all our tiny attempts to control and standardize it to fit our spinning world of commerce. It made me think of Fool’s Paradise, the new movie from Charlie Day out now. And earlier this week on the Sunny podcast, he was describing the plot and influences of the movie, this mute and contented main character who is pushed and pulled by the Hollywood world around him. (“Contentment,” or satos’a, also just so happened to be the component of the Niyama tenet of Ashtaunga Yoga we were learning in the weekly class at Edge of the Woods.) Without a word, P pulls from his bag a copy of the novel Being There, complete with a portrait of old Peter Sellers on the cover, from the Hal Ashby movie of the same name. I hadn’t mentioned it yet, but that was a heavily-cited influence for Charlie Day’s own movie, wanting to make the type of film that is so rarely seen nowadays. I was flabbergasted, stunned, reeling. Synchronicity is so frequent with P around it’s almost ordinary if it weren’t also so wondrous. This one shook me awake all over.
There are days and weeks like this one that make me love the world for what it gives to the listening.
I could go on more of these beautiful mysteries of alignment, like having another happenstance encounter in town with a friend from college (the first one); an acquaintance from the tech world that it turns out when I’m open and in my self and buoyant it’s possible to make deeper connections quickly; and to making new friends that same night with a fellow ketamine person who frequents now the same Portland quarry drum circle I used to attend. The multiple ways at Istoria on Thursday night that the sermon from the Divinity School witch reverberated in this week especially (decolonized ritual-making via My Grandmother’s Hands and Braiding Sweetgrass on the nightstand) along with that poet’s turn towards quantum entanglement after I shared “The Cathedral” for the second time in public, liking not only that it spoke to other people’s experiences, but also still held a mythic truth for me, too.
In that last moment, I find most deeply fascinating and meaning and yet should be unsurprised at how well and happy I felt in Isobel energy on Saturday night. I debuted a look I’ve been wanting to try out for some time, dubbed Mx. Isobel Submissafrizzle, for the combination of a thick leather collar and astronomical blue and white dress. People at Sanctuary certainly picked up on, even if I intently failed to admit I’ve never in my life seen an episode of Magic Schoolbus.
It is still a strange and almost disconcerting feeling, to receive an aesthetic compliment and not recoil shamefully at the attention, to not retreat and dissociate from a bodily gaze. Scott never went for that kind of positive scrutiny, always took it in and warped it through a lens of shame and a degree of inward-facing disgust. It does not quite yet make sense, nor do I have aspirations that it ever needs to, for the same physical body to find beauty, joy, self-love in the same mirror that day to day I shirk from and drop my eyes away, or at most take a clinical glance at.
I find the words come easily for the intellectual curiosity and fun of synchronicity, but am either hesitant or truly still awestruck at the world of difference this morning after Isobel’s night out. Did I dream it, and the memory is already dissolving into waking incoherence, like so many lived nights of REM sleep encountering the strange fantasies of the mind? Scott is here, in the daytime, caffeinated and hydrated, picking out caked bits of mascara from their eyelashes. The Sandperson’s visit is long over, and I just want to go back to sleep, to dream in Submissafrizzle just a little longer.