The Strange Coincidences Archive

When I got my second job at the age of 16 I accidentally changed the last digit of my social security number, it was a 9 and I thought and wrote that it was a 4. I always joked that the social security I got from that job went to someone else. Years later while working at another job as a hiring manager I hired a 16 year old boy. When I asked him his social security number I was amazed to find out that it was the one that I had used years earlier! I laughed and told him that he had received my social security money!

My coincidence, actually strange occurance happened this last weekend while visiting family in Minnesota. I went to a thrift store with my sister and I happened upon a novelty bar of soap still in the box. I tried to open it to see what it said of course the box said “Over the Hill Soap”. Thinking ahead that my husband will be forty I thought it would be funny to get it for him. I talked myself out of it and was ready to leave with my sister. She waited in line and I thought again about the soap. I went back and got it. When we arrived back at her house we joked about what the soap would look like or say. I am laughing as I open it up and as soon as I saw the soap I stopped and just stared at it. My sister stood across from me and asked me what it said. I looked at her and turned the soap around for her to read it. It has my name stamped into it “Lisa” . I have still been a little creeped out about it since I got it. There are just no “odds” of me buying that soap bar. It obviously was not the soap that was suppose to be in the box..yet after putting it down…I still went back and got it.

a few years back i was riding the schoolbus home with my girlfriend. a kid in front of us said to someone else ‘fug you.’ i said to the kid, ‘fug… that’s not even a word man.’ nothing else was said about it and we finished the bus ride. my girlfriend and i got off at her house and the conversation came up that i could make her laugh by saying any single word. to prove it, i closed my eyes and grabbed a book from her massive bookshelf. i flipped to a random page and stuck my finger on the paper. i opened my eyes and right where my finger was at was the word fug. it means the stuffy atmosphere of a poorly ventilated space. i’ve had great faith in a higher power ever since.

We had 2 sets of friends who didn’t know each other previously around for dinner. The 2 women get talking about how they used to live in Sydney, the one happened to ask “where in Sydney”, it turned out they had lived in the same town, so they continued, OK what road and what Number. They had both rented the very same flat, some 15 years apart.

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

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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

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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.