Somewhere in my second year of university a long absent highschool friend dialed in. Sometime in the evening – wouldn’t surprise me if it was a 7 o’clock timestamp.
This was a friend from middle school, actually. Surprisingly! Watching someone grow in your memories and morph into whatever they are now, there’s something rewarding about it. It almost breaks your conception of linear time, doesn’t it? I mean, even as I attempt this “memory access” so sometimes the middle school conversations seem more “immediate” than this anonymous night.
Anyway, for background, this friend did a sizable amount of drugs. Which is a reasonable response to the despondency – or challenges therein – of highschool’s unveiling. Unveiling the world, pecking structures, or just an inadequacy faced against those who’ve studied The Art of War for thousands of years. Why not smoke a blunt?
Sometimes it’d remind me of that Narcissus and Goldmund novella. Not to paint myself as an astute and devout one, nothing at all. It just was a contrast. A contrast embedded as we’d walk around the mall and so he’d talk about the craziness he’s been up to. Lots of drugs, lots of distance, lots of wandering around and yet we still connected. Living a straight-laced existence bestows its own insanity to those lucid or wretched enough.
So that’s the background, and I get this phone call – leaning out the apartment balcony situated between roommate dwellings. Complete with a chipped fence and a grungy plastic chair. Maybe it was raining, and if it wasn’t it may as well have been. The conversation started with him laughing a lot, and I knew then this was the beginning of a fever dream.
He decided to do some sort of shroom ritual shared between a few others and I wouldn’t know what it was or how it was – or maybe he did some DMT too, who knows. Nevertheless we meandered and clipped into form, the typical form of listening to the craziness he’s been up to.
When he took those shrooms – coincided with his cursory readings of How This World Works – well, the way he was talking may as well been evident: that he saw the machinations of God.
You could hear him gesticulating and maybe almost in tears between all the laughter. One word he kept repeating was “synchronicity“ – that is, a coincidence too strange to not note.
The phone call reached its zenith through him giggling between a description of a World’s Lotus – that we’re fated, in an Eternal Recurrence affirmation, to do this again and again. That we’re in this cyclic maze and will be here again and it all starts again. And that we’re all rippling here, something like that, and the synchronicities reveal a tapestry where we’re all woven, and the reverbs jump between. This is me riffing, but that’s the gist of what I vaguely remember.
I think that was the last conversation I ever had with him. So it was, so it went: a conversation about our blooming world and a cyclic, reoccurring dream.
It does make a smidgen of sense, or it’s amusing alone and amusement is the Judge of our days, the attribute which flattens all else. I love these sort of things though.
Perhaps there’s a synchronicity folded between these pages. Maybe not.
It’s no surprise that I’ve read a lot – a lot, a lot – of conspiracies and interviews, dated threads and end-of-the-world sort of things, and they peak out in the strangest ways.
As I click around I find all of these strange connections. They’re hard to ignore – connections of which I had no clue of the facts until five seconds ago.
It is often said that we all are the same thing talking to one another. I guess synchronicity only reinforces that theory.
I was going to take this moment to share some strange coincidences that only happened today, but now I’m being all bashful about it.
Anyway, in some respects, my old friend and I weren’t that much different.
We laugh all the same.