Strange Treasure

[jack_babalon]

An odd experience this morning.

So I decide to treat myself to an espresso a little over an hour ago. I'm about to go to the shopping plaza across the tracks where there's a decent Caribou Coffee under a sushi resteraunt. But when I reach the corner of Moreland/US 23 something 'tells me' to go left towards Aurora Coffe down in Little Five instead of right towards the plaza. Being a man of intuition I do just that. You should know that I always go with my gut, not because I'm some sort of mystic-zen-hipster type... but really because I'm too lazy to go through the bother of questioning my instincts.

Anyway as I'm passing the abandoned antique shop on the corner of Austin Avenue (the old round building with the columns out front so it looks like a deserted temple... I think it was called the 'wrecking bar' or something like that), I notice a splayed open suitcase lying there in the bushes of the parking lot. I don't stop, but for some reason I'm reminded immediately of an old William Burroughs story about this junkie who comes upon an empty suitcase on Christmas Eve and discovers a pair of severed legs inside it. Eventually the junkie dumps the limbs and pawns the suitcase for some shooting-up money.

This is odd because I hadn't thought of this story in ages, but remember owning a spoken word version on this old EP that Burroughs did with Kurt Cobain. In fact it was the last 'record' I bought right before moving up from Liqourdale to Terminus some 15 years ago.

Okay, here's where things get kinda strange: I'm walking back now, having scored my own fix ('a tall shot-in-the-dark with an extra shot of espresso') and spy the suitcase still in the bushes.

'What the hell' I tell myself and go over to scope it out.

The first thing I notice is a CD with the front of its jewel case missing lying right there on top of a pair of rain soaked black shorts. I pick it up and there it is... I shit you not... William S Burroughs & Kurt Cobain's The "Priest" they called him.

BANG!

I'm suddenly overwhelmed by all these competing thoughts and emotions: I feel like I'm being watched for some reason but there's no one there around me except passing traffic. I feel giddy - as if I somehow 'willed' this CD into existence by virtue of a nostalgic yearning for it. I feel a slight nervous trepidation - as if I just became aware that I was now inside some vast mechanism beyond the measure of my senses. I feel stupid for thinking the last thought. Mainly I just feel lucky though and pocket the CD... along with a hand painted ceramic frog I found under a damp dress... so without looking back I head back home.

Long story short - the CD looked water damaged and I sincerely doubted it would play. I popped it into my computer though and was able to rip it without any problems. Haven't listened to it yet (it's really best heard on Christmas Eve in my opinion).

What's odd is that I used to have experiences like this go down all the time... I would think one thing and so long as I didn't think that thing would happen... it would happen. I don't know if that last sentence makes sense, but it's the best I got as far as trying to explain the process as I remember it. I would find books by an author I had just told myself I needed to read lying in the trash, would find the exact spare change I needed on the ground when I couldn't afford the MARTA fare and get phone calls out-of-the-blue from people I had just remembered only moments before.

I doubt it's proof of anything magickal or the like... just an unsettling pendacity for coincidence I suppose mixed with the fact that I walk as often as other people drive making me more prone to finding things I need or think about. I've often wondered if I might be slightly 'schizotypal'. Though to be honest a steady diet of 'my bad habit' over the years mixed with my former day job kept me off the serendipity playing field for well over a decade.

Still there's this nagging feeling that 'something just happened' that I can't shake... maybe it's true what they say about us criminals being "...a cowardly and superstitious lot".

For now though my William Burroughs audio library is almost complete and hey, why look a gift horse in the mouth... even if there is a skeleton in black armor riding it?

Comments

[featherynscale.livejournal.com]

Go, synchronicity, go. I love those moments; they keep me one foot in the magician game.

[jackbabalon23.livejournal.com]

That spark of love for those moments is probably what makes you a magician, but for me I just get baffled and nervous waiting for the other foot to drop.

[ammutbite.livejournal.com]

The lavatory has been locked for three hours solid…. I think they are using it for an operating room….

Something's in the air. I was just reading an interview with Terry Southern and WB from an old High Times magazine before I checked LJ

[jackbabalon23.livejournal.com]

I'm not familiar with Terry Southern off-hand, though I remember seeing him briefly in an old 80's era Burroughs documentary (not Commisoner of Sewers but another one). I had no idea there was a Burroughs High Times interview... I'll have to look that up.

[catwalk.livejournal.com]

coffee and burrows... the pb&j of the fringe.

[jackbabalon23.livejournal.com]

That's why I wear an aluminum beret and my sunglasses at night, m'dear.

[entropic-om.livejournal.com]

There's a story somewhere that says when you can see "God"'s hand, the changes in the universe as they happen, then you can manifest anything. Like wiggling your toes in the proverbial flow.

Whatever you decide it is, or isn't, it's a very cool occurrence.

[jackbabalon23.livejournal.com]

Here's hoping... because I have a lot of shit I need to be manifesting in my life right now!

[vomikronnoxis.livejournal.com]

I'm one to believe these things don't just happen.

I would also get rid of that suitcase before it compels you to saw someone's legs off -- maybe your own...

~rl

[jackbabalon23.livejournal.com]

"The accidents don't happen" school of thought, perhaps?

The suitcase is still in the bushes as of this afternoon, I passed it by on the way home earlier. No severed legs for now...whew!

[kissmythistle.livejournal.com]

One of my friends was trolling the parts stores in an area of Virginia that's a lot like Buford Highway looking for an obscure Toyota part. Despairing of ever finding it, she pulled into a 7-11 parking lot, and in the next space over, the exact part was lying on the asphalt. Srsly.

Then there was the time that my ex-husband and I, buying food with our last $2, got the wrong order (bags and bags of food) at a drive-through window.

Synchronicity is all around and I always feel like I'm on the right track when it happens.

[jackbabalon23.livejournal.com]

To be honest I always love and hate those moments... because as a writer, if I had one of my protagonists walk by a suitcase have it remind them of something and then on the way back there was that thing it reminded them of... the reader would be inclined to think it was too unlikely and hence a distraction.

As Featherynscale says above - 'funny old world'.