Someone reminded me of a post I wrote last summer while walking home to my digs after rehearsal. It was a balmy summer night and I met a badger, but my thoughts were on an apocalypse that was being predicted by the internet. This one was because of the colour of the moon and some Mayan calendar jiggery-pokery.
It wasn’t the end of the world that time, but there are plenty of events around as potential triggers these days. If you roll the dice often enough you get snake eyes. But it seems a lot of people have forgotten that coincidence just … well it just happens. Maybe I predicted this damp and uninspiring apocalypse. A certain personality type might edit the old post to smell like what actually happened rather than loads of words, and then go around with a God complex. The same personality type though would have been drumming up millions of followers by shouting. I’m glad I’m not that personality type. I can just whisper into this echo chamber before bed and not wake up to pages and pages of badly spelt opinions in capitals.
I’m as bad as everybody else about coincidence. I get some good luck and I say it’s “The Universe” so I don’t have to say it’s one of the pretendyface things, but what I call “The Universe” fills the gap left by spaghetti monster or daddy-beardy or fatman or one-eye or threeface or Rum ‘n Raisin or whatever your flavour of God might be.
But we must remember that patterns can come together in nature and stay for a while just by chance. Coincidences happen. And if we are looking for patterns we can sometimes find patterns that are random and assume they must be what we are looking for.
About a year ago my downstairs neighbour came ringing on my bell. “One of your appliances flooded water into my flat last night.”
I’d had the same flat with the same complaint repeatedly a few years previously and they only ever shouted when it rained. That time it was the guttering.
The night before this time it had been sheeting rain all night. It was still raining when we spoke. Open and shut case. “It was raining hard last night. It’s coming in from the guttering again.” I said, even though I ran the washing machine the night before. Two months later in America it became apparent it was DEFINITELY the washing machine when Brian did it twice in a row in one week. Emergency plumber plus Tristan as keyholder plus too much money taught me the meaning of the pompous phrase “correlation does not imply causation”. It had been raining. I wanted the rain to be the cause. I was indignantly convinced the rain was the cause to the extent I was bristling and angry with my neighbor for daring to think it was my appliances.
It was my appliances.
“Correlation does not imply causation”. It’s a phrase people who are overeducated use to try and talk down to people who have what they think of as crazy pattern-seeking ideas. Speaking as someone overeducated: don’t do that shit! You’re never going to win someone over by showing them you know better words. It’s the same mistake to correct their grammar. They didn’t listen to teacher back then. If you make yourself sound like teacher you can be as easily dismissed.
Right now the usual well known suspects are chasing the paranoid pound hard online and no surprises. This is fucking arbitrary this lockdown. We are all stuck at home and if we really want to believe that we don’t have to be, we can listen to lots of voices telling us what we want to hear. “I’ve been out licking doorhandles every day and I’ve had no Coronavirus!” Yes, because everybody else has been isolating, bless you. But it’s always nice to feel you have specialist knowledge. I’ve been listening to some endless stuff today so I can sit beside people and at least have a handle on the indoctrination. The tone of it! Always everything so so very very serious even if the content is rubbish.
Anyway. Time for bed. Telepathic frogs are making you bald. It’s too late for me. They were bred by Henry Kissinger. And do you know who has a frog farm? Barack Obama. But you won’t find that in the mainstream media.
TRANSLATION: Get off social media, Al.
AlBarclay 