The Strange Coincidences Archive

A coincidence:

The last time I came on here, was about a year ago. I just remembered about this site randomly, so I decided to come on here. So since I had posted several of my stories on here before, I wanted to find them in the archive but I could\‘nt. I was talking to my friend, Jo, online so I asked her to think of a random page number, and she said 17. And I was shellshocked, because when I clicked page 17, after so many tries, I was greeted by my stories on the page.

I recently posted on \“The strange coincidence archive\” because, pretty frequently (almost twice every day) I keep seeing the same numbers when I look at the time (always digital) 1:11, 2:22, etc. Its started happening this year, but more frequently since the past 4 or 5 months (almost everyday of the week, sometimes twice a day). Not just on my phone, clock, computer, or tv, but also in public places where time is displayed. Its hard to ignore the spookiness of it because, since noticing the numbers, I\‘ve become reluctant to look at the time anymore yet whenever i do its the same numbers anyway. Its even stranger that the times displayed my phone, clock, computer, tv, etc, are not synchronized with each other.

It happens when I wanna call someone on my cell, when I\‘m on then computer, when i wake up in the mornings and squint at the digital clock on the wall, when I walk by a cable box, Rockafelllar center, on vacation, commutes, at work, pretty much ANYWHERE theres digital time. For example just this week: Yesterday I sat down at my computer for the first time of the day and my first IM is sent at 2:22 (gmail IM\‘s tell you after every im the time it was sent). And then earlier this week I was on the subway and whip out my phone to make a call and it says its 3:33. Today, I woke up and decide to turn on the tv and its 11:11 on channel NY1(already on). I just got off work this evening, came home fed the cats and turn on the tv, Its already on ABC news and it says it\‘s 5:55.

Even my boyfriend thinks its crazy. He\‘s a witness!

well, I think its a lucky sign.

For most of this year I\‘ve been having really weird coincidences happen almost on a everyday basis. It involves time. I\‘d just happen to look at the time and its all the hour and the minutes are all the same numbers. And its not like i check the time waiting for it to be 2:22, 3:33, 4:44, etc. It happens when I wanna call someone on my cell, or I\‘m on then computer and i glance at the time, when i wake up in the mornings and squint at the digital clock on the wall, when I walk by the cable box, Rockafelllar center, pretty much ANYWHERE theres a digital clock. Its spooked me enough avoid seeing what time it is anymore.

For example: it happened again today. I woke up and decide to turn on the tv and its 11:11 on channel NY1. I just got off work this evening, came home feed the cats and turn on the tv, Its on ABC news and it says it\‘s 5:55. Yesterday I sat down at my computer for the first time of the day to IM my BF at work and my first IM to him is sent at 2:22 (gmail IM\‘s tell you after every im the time it was sent). Earlier this week I was on the subway and whip out my phone to call my BF when we get out of the subway tunnel and it says its 3:33. Funny thing is the time on my computer, cell phone, Tv news channels, the digital clocks in public places aren\‘t in Sync with each other either but I just keep happening to see these coincidences. I\‘ve started telling my BF the moment it happens because it was happening too frequently to ignore. I dont know what this all means.

About me: I recently graduated (BA in Illustration) this year in May. live with my bf (Graphic designer) in a rented apartment and have a black and a tuxedo cats.

If anyone has any ideas about what it all means, I\‘d like to hear it!

Dear Sir
Back in the day, many moons ago when I was at Secondary School, during the fourth and fifth years, a huge obsessive cult grew up and around a Physics teacher called Mr Dalby, a large bodied but mild mannered man who bore something of a resemblence to Bryan Mosely, the actor who played Alf Roberts in Coronation Street.
A person who for a reason or reasons I have never been able to draw a rational conclusion for, we all of a sudden began to find quite hysterical, \“DALBY\” shouting and graffiti abounded both in and around the school, and anything connected with him became an object of automatic fascination.
Being very much part of my history and bearing little relevence to my present, it hasn\‘t been an area that I am prone to giving much further thought to.
A short while ago as I was leaving the Record And Tape Exchange in Berwick Street in Soho, a shop sign opposite caught my eye, newly painted red on blue or vice versa, and one I had never seen before, which read \“DALBY\‘S CAFE\”.
Instantly bringing back memories of the halcyon days of the Dalby
episode to my mind and I stood for a minute or two admiring this unexpected occurance, before continuing about my business and thinking no more about it.
However, the next time I was in Berwick St, a week or so later, I noticed very to my surprise that this cafe was no longer there !
Unable to remember exactly at which address it had been, I made enquiries at the two possible premises it could have stood at, these being THE BERWICK STREET CLOTH SHOP at No 14 and the reception of SILK SOUND at No 13.
However members of staff at both of these businesses confirmed that
they had been situated at these addresses for many years and at no time had a cafe of any description been in existance in recent years.
They also confirmed that neither had their frontages been made up for use as a film set, this being a possibility, and the only rational explanation I could think of. I stood and stand most perplexed on this matter, I have absolutely no idea what make of this.
It never occured to me at the time to make any investigation of the cafe when I saw it, to venture inside or just take a quick look through the window, as I had no particular reason to do so.
But if I had troubled myself to simply cross the road to do this, I wonder exactly what I would have seen ?

Yours Faithfully

STEVE

i had 2 flying flippo’s in hand (the ones that come in a bag of crisps, flat round discs), my mom had just cleaned the table but had left just one glass on the table. I told my mom “look!” and i threw the 2 discs pressed together in one hand on the table. I was standing at 3 meters of the table and wasn’t really aiming at the glass. It was just joking claiming i could throw them in the glass. They both went their own way, they spun apart and then came back together, and landed in the glass. We both stood there amazed. one glass, two flippo’s in it.

Thomas

“One would soon go mad if one took such coincidences too seriously. One might be led to suspect that there were all sorts of things going on in the Universe which he or she did not thoroughly understand.” : Kurt Vonnegut

—-
Introduction
—-

On January 30th, 2006, I was suddenly compelled to explore the hidden crawlspace under my back stairs.

Now, I’m “Max Action – Urban Explorer” – a huge part of my life and self has been built up around my passion for exploring caves, tunnels, rooftops, basements – spaces between, spaces forgotten, spaces forbidden. And, of course, I LOVE crawlspaces.

They’re definitive Spaces Between – hidden away out of sight and mind – voids where people put things to be kept yet forgotten forever – a shadowy Sheol where “the dead know nothing; they have no further reward, and even the memory of them is forgotten.”

And my particular crawlspace has great potential, in part because my weird little house is pretty old – built in 1912.

And this is one of the Weird Things involved in this tale – in eight years of living in the house, years spent exploring every dark and hidden nook and cranny I could find in the Twin Cities area – I had never, ever been into the crawlspace, in my own house.

I’d never even looked into it.

There’s only one way to get in – an access hatch in the wall, on the way down into the basement.

It’s easy to miss if you’re not looking for it – a plain white board set firmly in place within a white wooden frame. There’s no handle, no simple way to open it.

Of course, I could have gotten in with 15 seconds work and a screwdriver.

But I never did.

It’s been under my nose all this time, and I’ve never had the curiosity, even once, to pull it open and see what is in there.

Weird.

But now, suddenly, it was time to check it out.

—-
Exploration
—-

So I grabbed a flashlight, dust mask, and one of the two suction cup thingies that I’d liberated from a downtown window crew many years ago. Asylunt – my roommate – grabbed a digital camera to document the occasion – Max Action Explores his Own House kind of thing.
By the time he got back there, I’d already smacked the suction cup onto the board and wrenched it free from its frame.

Specialized Urban Exploration Gear: Suction cup cellar opener device

Shining my flashlight in, the first thing I saw was a bunch of insulation. And a whole lot of cobwebs.

Further examination revealed two dead mice, dessicating away on the plastic sheeting that had been laid down over the raw earth floor. An old coffee can, rusted down to a fragment. A similarly- corroded strainer.

To the far right of the space, two withered men’s shoes, and one dry-rotting woman’s shoe. A stamped metal ID tag of some kind.

Everything was taken out into the light, examined, and carefully set aside.

Having removed everything that I could see, I pulled the dust mask on and crawled into the hole.

My goal was to see what the walls were like behind the collapsed cardboard boxes that lined the walls of the crawlspace.

But I never did find out.

As I crawled beneath the stairs, I felt something hard in the soft dirt beneath the plastic – a kinda domed bulge, sticking up slightly above ground level. Maybe it was finally time to find a human skull?

So I wormed one arm under the plastic, and probed the object. Whatever it was, it was embedded in the dirt, and it wasn’t a skull.

I pulled it out and then twisted onto my back to examine the find with the flashlight.

It was a buried teapot I’d discovered – ancient-looking, aluminum, covered in white corrosion, missing its handle, powdered grime pouring from the spout.

Just an old teapot – just another piece of junk that someone long ago had abandoned in the crawlspace.

But looking at it, my mind… it boggled.

‘So this is what it’s like to have your mind blown,’ I thought.

But for that to make any sense at all, you’ll need some background.

Hold on, this is going to get weird.

—-
Background: California Tripping – January 15
—-

I took a trip to California in mid January of 2006, with Saddlesore.

On our last day there, we hiked to the very end of Tomales Point – the northernmost tip of land on the western side of the San Andreas faultline.

We were surrounded on three sides by ocean, miles from the nearest road, buffeted by the wind cresting over the cliffs, in the most surreal, stunning landscape I have ever witnessed. The interplay of earth, water, light, and life were breathtaking, and the immediacy of the place and moment dwarfed all the things I’d thought were important to me back in civilization. All distinctions were revealed as arbitrary, and I was washed away in experiencing the ‘oneness’ of all things.

Heh. You probably either know exactly what I mean, or you think I’ve absolutely lost it – either way, no need for me to go on.

Which works out anyway as I can’t really recall the specifics that well – these experiences are hard to hold onto – like the details of a dream, they slip away between your fingers the harder you try to hold onto them.

But I can say this – it was what people call a mystical experience.

And trust me, the former “King of the Atheists” and scourge of the hippies does not toss words like that around easily, without scorn or irony.

Especially in public.

But it’s true.

And I can say this, too – that in the aftermath of that experience, I found myself on a roll of following some intuition, an inner voice that pulled me where it seemed I needed to go. I felt in control of my reality in a way I never had before – by letting go of reason and deliberation, silencing the paralyzing mental chatter, and just – doing.

And it worked.

My house transformed from an intractably dark and dusty space to a more open, light, clean space almost effortlessly, and in doing so seemed to mirror the transformations going on elsewhere in my mind and life.

I won’t go too much into that here -let’s just say it was a fertile time for change – positive change.

And yet… old habits die hard; as several days passed and the immediacy of my mystical experience faded a bit, I found myself increasingly skeptical of this way of being, this way of seeing the world.

And that was the state of mind I was in on January 21st – my first Saturday back from California – one week before I first explored my crawlspace.

That Saturday I took a trip to Unique Thrift store with some friends, to go trolling for cool junk.

—-
Background: Thrift Store, Jan 21st.
—-

As usual, by the end of the trip through the thrift store, our shared cart was full of random stuff – I grab everything that catches my mind, and then, before checking out, go through the cart and jettison the stuff that doesn’t quite appeal enough to trade money for, after all.

Many things were discarded in this process, but I could not bring myself to get rid of one specific item.

I was bemused to find myself struggling to justify why I felt so compelled to buy this thing – to myself and to my friends… who found my efforts amusingly incomprehensible.

“I don’t know – there’s just something satisfying about it -
I like the materials, the construction maybe -
the connotations are somehow pleasant to me.
I don’t know. I just feel like I want this in my house.”

Finally, I decided to go along with my fading post-Tomales Point intuition kick, and just let myself be guided – by instinct, by magic, by whatever the hell it is.

So I put it back in the cart with the other “keeper” items, saying,

“Well, I don’t drink tea very often now, but maybe I’ll start.”

Yes, the object I’d decided to buy was a teapot.

It had grabbed my eye and sucked me in from halfway across the store, up on the high top shelf. I’d been strongly drawn to it… even though I don’t usually wander into the housewares section ar all, and have never considered myself to be the kind of person who owns – let alone buys – a teapot.

Regardless, I bought the teapot, and brought it home with me.

—-
Synchronicity / Back to Where We Started
—-

Trying to figure out why this teapot had demanded I buy it, I brewed some instant teabags in it. The tea wasn’t bad, but it wasn’t anything special, either.

Over the next few days, I was not surprised (but was somewhat disappointed) when nothing really came of the purchase.

Within a week it was sitting in the kitchen, already almost forgotten.

Around this time, I bought my house – and that night, I decided to explore the crawlspace for the first time.

You remember this part – I found a buried teapot in there – long forgotten in the darkness.

You probably also remember that it blew my mind.

And here’s why – the teapot I’d just found buried under my house was identical to the teapot that I’d brought home from the store a few days earlier.

Same design.

Same size.

Same materials.

Same hinges.

Same spout.

The same teapot.

It had been literally buried under my house the entire time I’d lived here.

—-
Aftermath
—-

Today, the two teapots sit together in my living room, where I see them every day – their spouts arced together over a green pebble from Point Reyes, like some kind of altar to synchronicity.

Synchronicity : most simply, the belief that some coincidences are not mere coincidences.

That some coincidences are meaningful.

I believe that this was one of them.

It’s hard to explain why, since I don’t find evidence for any given theory in this synchronicity… I don’t believe it reveals the actions of gods or ghosts any more than I believe that it can be written off as a random coincidence.

Imagine waking up from a dream to find that you had brought something back with you : clenched in both hands as real as anything, from someplace that isn’t supposed to be real.

Although you might never be able to guess how it happened or why, it would still change you.

I don’t pretend to know how these teapots happened, or why they happened.

I only know this:

They did happen.

Teapots happen.

And that’s why I’m glad I have them :

To remind me.

- Max Action, www.ActionSquad.org – 12/2/06

—-

I’m a lifelong St. Louis Cardinals baseball fan, though I haven’t lived in that area in over 20 years. Last year in the first round of the playoffs, my willpower weakened, I bought an 80 cent candy bar and got 2 dimes in change. I never look at the dates of coins, but one of them seemed rather worn, so I checked out the date on it: 1967. That made me look at the other dime’s date: 1982. Those were the last 2 times that the Cardinals won the World Series. For those of you who are not addicted to baseball, the Cards won last year, too.

I met my best friend in a Texas high school in 1981. We were both military brats who’d spent time in Germany so we had some stuff in common.

While my mom was organizing old photos in 1986, we discovered that my family and my best friend’s family had stayed at the same hotel in Munich during the same weekend in 1978. The best friend, her brother and stepfather were in the background of several of our pictures and even appeared in ‘walk on roles’ in some of the movies my dad took at the Olympic Stadium.

While filing the paperwork to admit someone into the nursing home where I worked,some years ago, in Texas, I was astounded to see that the person’s former address was the same one I had had as a child, many,many years before, in Escondido, California.

Years ago, I broke down on the road between Las Cruces and Alamogordo, NM. While I waited for help, I stopped in a cafe that had a couple of shelves of used books. I bought three of them and read one while eating a sandwich.
Help arrived (didn’t have enough gas for the grade of the road) and I went home to . Opened one of the unread books a few days later and there was my bookplate.