My urban rooster

Sneaky synchronicity has reared its fateful head again!

And in addition to this, I'm pleased to report that I have a new animal spirit guide. 

Behold: my rooster. 

I've written about meaningful coincidences and animal totems before. 

The last time I wrote about synchronicity I was on vacation in the Florida Panhandle trying to figure out the significance of seeing butterfly nets. And the last time I wrote about animal spirit guides, in particular my frog spirit guide, I got a tongue lashing from Natasha up in Alberta, Canada.

This time it's cocks.

Someone in the neighborhood has a rooster. How else can I explain the barnyard opera I'm hearing in the morning when I walk the pug? 

The first time I heard it, I froze in my tracks. 

Could it be? I asked myself. A rooster crowing in the City of St. Pete? I wrote it off as a Basset Hound and continued walking the obstinate pug.

Again it crowed. 

I looked down at my pug to see if maybe he had heard it too, but he was uncharacteristically uncurious and continued about his sniffing, pissing and grunting. So I let it go – until Thursday morning, when I heard it again. 

Well, I'll be damned, I said. A goddamn rooster living in the city! 

When I returned to the house with this knowledge, I had to tell Joe.

"Must be someone knows you've got problems getting out of bed in the morning."

He grunted. Rolled over on his side.

"A rooster in our neighborhood! How exciting! First tomatoes, now this. Man, it's like I'm back home again."

To further illustrate my point, I started mimicking the cock.

"If it's not a rooster it sure sounds like one," I said as I shuffled to the kitchen to make Joe's usual turkey sammie. 

Five minutes later, I went digging for a little card to stick in his Tupperware container. I'm lame and sappy and sometimes put notes in my fiancé's lunch. I've got this box of random note cards with one note card for every day of the year. They're tiny – the size of a matchbook – and therefore function perfectly as embarrassing lunch love notes. 

So I reached into my box of 365 note cards (at this point there are about 300 left) and I pulled one at random. Now remember: no two cards in this collection are alike, making what happened next quite impressive.

On the front of the card was of course, a devilish rooster. But I reckon you already knew that.

So now it seems a rooster is my shepherd, signaling the end of the tree frog's reign. 

As for what exactly the rooster means, I found this:

Rooster (aka Cock): Rooster is a symbol of resurrection and sexuality as he heralds in the dawn of a new day. Often, good news is at hand when Rooster appears in Dreamtime. However, watchfulness is key as the dreamer must be ever aware of being overly arrogant or cocky. Rooster reminds us to avoid fighting at all costs. The lesson is to respect others while honoring ourselves, or we just might find ourselves ensnared in a ruse of our own making.

Or this:

The Rooster is a solar symbol and represents sexuality. Those with a Rooster as a Totem may have had past lives as early Christians or ancient Greeks. A Rooster totem brings enthusiasm and humor and a sense of optimism. The Rooster is a totem of great power and mystery with ties to the ancient past and clues to your own hidden powers. It is the enemy of evil spirits and can bound them with the light of day.

Cockadoodledoo! I already love this totem way better than the tree frog.  

--

PS. The misguided rooster above was photographed by McBeth. For more evocative storytelling pictures like this, visit McBeth's Flickr photostream. She photographs vexing toothbrush packages, puzzling road signs, tea bags and much, much more!

On seeing butterfly nets.

There's this fantastic theory, this conceptual theory first suggested by psychologist Carl Jung, called synchronicity that surrounds my every move. 

It is the idea that a collective unconscious pulls random things - ideas, names, events, places - from whoknowswhere and plants them in your head only to have you happen upon them later. Whether later means 15 minutes or 15 years, is as Einstein would say, completely relative. 

All you need to know to understand synchronicity is that coincidences are meaningful.

A few years ago when I was out shopping for a religion I came upon Jung's theory. I naturally gravitated toward synchronicity as I was raised to believe in similar faiths such as Shit Happens and It All Comes Out in the Wash, the likes of which my father preached daily.

Synchronicity is the natural evolution of these two theories, less crude and with the right amount of Faith and Magic, which we all know is the same witchcraft anyway. I fell for synchronicity on the spot. I figured if Carl Jung was a fan of Lewis Carroll than I was a fan of Carl Jung. 

It is also important to note that around this time I also learned I could control my dreams. Not in the sense of willing myself to dream certain things, but in the sense of taking control of my dreams while having them. For example, once while sleeping over at my Oma's house, I dreamt that a man walked through Oma's sliding glass door and held a gun to my head. 

I was scared at first. Guns to your head will do that, even in dreams. And so I screamed. I was sleeping next to my Japanese exchange student Yuuki, and according to her I screamed pretty loud and then zonked back to sleep. What happened next I can only explain in the way out-of-body-experienced folks talk about death on the operating table, except of course instead of watching myself die I was watching myself dream. 

Floating out of my dream, I hovered close to my sleeping head and peered down at my nightmaring self. I was asleep on Oma's pullout couch, asleep in an old folks community on the Gulf Coast of Florida. The only thing pointed at my head was a snoring pug. Fat, content and puffing like a diesel engine. 

Well I'll be damned, I snorted and then I slipped back into dreaming armed with newfound power.

The gunman was still there, still standing with a gun at my head as if the dream had been on pause.

"Pull the trigger," I taunted him. "Won't make a lick of a difference."

I have no idea if he actually did. All I can remember is feeling like I was let in on something, like the first time I was told the sky wasn't blue, that my brain just makes it that way by processing scattered light.  

Once I understand that, the sky could be neon green if I wanted. 

...

Anyway, back to why I brought up synchronicity ...

This vacation has been one big bowl of collective unconscious, a series of synchronic flashes that all began with a butterfly net about a month ago, around the same time my sister PK moved to Florida.

Joe and I were walking the pug down 3rd Street in St. Pete when we both remarked that the 10-year-old boy across the street from our apartment catching butterflies in a long handled net was so ... Leave it to Beaver that why of course we'd have to purchase a home in Old Northeast, the quaintest hood in town.

From that point on butterfly nets kept popping up. About a week ago I watched someone on I-275 near the exit for Tropicana Stadium pass me going 85 mph with a giant butterfly net half hanging out of their passenger door. A butterfly net dragging along the interstate at 85 mph! The dragging sounded like a chain saw running out of gas. It was impossible to miss even if you weren't in the business of looking for butterfly nets. 

There were other net incidents too of course, but I won't bore you. Suffice it to say that when I got to St. George Island last week I walked into the island's lone convenient store, noticed a big box of butterfly nets for sale at the counter and figured perhaps it was butterfly hunting season in Florida. 

While on vacay I finished reading The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls, an amazing memoir that everyone should read, and then upon thinking of my next read I thought: Ugh, I hope I don't pick up one of those poor, pitiful divorced thirty-something works of fiction that usually start with the female protagonist sulking around her house in her ex-husband's white button-down shirt. 

And then two days ago Joe and I drove up to Tallahassee, walked into Borders to find new books and on the first page of the first book I selected was a sentence describing some trifling thirty-something woman pondering love in her ex-husband's button-down shirt. 

Around this time I remembered a book I bought years ago from a used bookstore in Port Colborne, Canada, a tiny Lake Erie fishing village my family ended up stranded in when the transmission failed in our antique Chris Craft boat. I wandered this port town for hours looking for bookstores. I eventually found one and ended up with several books, all of which I read during our shipwrecked time in Port Colborne save for one collection of short stories - Burning Your Boats by Angela Carter. 

So I wonder, on the car ride to Tallahassee, how come I never read Burning Your Boats? Was it because I was only 17 and fancied Salman Rushdie's introduction to the book arrogant? 

Back in the bookstore I shelve the story of the divorcee in the white button-down and begin randomly scanning the store again. I shuffle to another part of the store, pull a title at random and kazaam ... it's Angela Carter's Burning Your Boats. I lose my shit and move on to a book by Pam Houston, whom I had the pleasure of meeting last month at a writer's conference in Boulder, Colo.

OK, so I'm on to something with books and butterfly nets. No big deal, eh?

The next morning Joe and I turn on the Today Show, because we're on vacation and all about morning TV and intravenous coffee. 

He comments on Al Roker, whether or not Roker is a freak of nature or something along those lines and I say, "I used to work with a woman at the newspaper who's good friends with Al Roker. She flew to New York for Roker's wedding. Her husband sings all that Trop Rock Jimmy Buffett crap and Roker is a parrothead. They met him in the Cayman Islands back when he was fat." 

That night, Joe and I drive down to the convenient store - the same joint selling butterfly nets - and on my way out the door I grab the local newspaper, The Oyster. I turn the front page over and there he is, on the second page, my old coworker's husband the Trop Rock singer, headlining some sort of Oyster Spat Festival on St. George Island.

"Get out of town with this freaking synchronicity!" I cry.

So this morning I sat down to write this post and as I did Joe walked past me at the computer and said, "Hey I updated your computer. All those system updates started piling up."

I said, "When my sister did that her hard drive crashed. That's why I ignore them."

And he said, "System updates won't cause your hard drive to crash. If that happened it was a coincidence."

A coincidence! Are you kidding me? I re-read the beginning of this post, paused and narrowed my eyes into distrustful slants. The word I had just typed was coincidence. 

Egads! What does it all mean?!

..

 

PS. The Alice illustration at the top of this post is by Stephanie Fizer. I love her work. I love that she like to eat pickles and lives in West Virginia with her boyfriend. I love that she compulsively makes lists. I love that she's a vegetarian who hates meat more because of the texture and less because of animal cruelty. 

St. George Island, Alaska

I just discovered there's a St. George Island, Alaska. The pictures posted here were taken by Al and Linda.

According to the 2000 U.S. Census SGI, Alaska is 182 square miles and populated by 152 people - 92 percent of which are Native Americans.

A case of the Mondays.

On Mondays I usually plead with my fish Martha, whom I keep in a bowl on my desk, to finish writing my stories so I can write sentences that start with things like "... a man walked into a forest and stumbled into a clearing, where under the shade of a sycamore tree a redheaded woman was seated at a piano playing spy music."

So what am I doing with this moment? This 1:18 p.m.-on-a-Monday moment when normally I'd be glued to a story, the next callback, a too-tiny reporter's notepad and a bout of procrastination? I'm drinking a Coors Light on the balcony of a big blue beach house on stilts, trying to figure out why there are currents in the Gulf of Mexico that are wavy and currents that are calm.

Joe's working on an album, not at this moment but in the ongoing sense of it. He's wants to record an album concerning the various wooden sea creatures that are nailed to the walls of this house. The tracks are all named after each species of wooden sea creature. 1. The Blue Marlin 2. Hammerhead 3. The Dolphin Saves the Day and 4. How Did a Cow Get in Here? I copied these titles directly from the reporters notebook he scribbled them in.

We're burning through books and with no amenities on St. George Island save for The Big Top market located on the mainland 15 minutes away, we're off to find a bookstore in Eastpoint, Florida (population: 2,158.)

In a county where the nearest city is Apalachicola, which sounds to me like something pirates fall sick from, I have no doubt we'll find an interesting used bookstore.

Residual fireworks.

On the 6th of July I remembered four things:

I remembered the first time I tried to swim without arm floats. How the water felt like pudding and my arms felt like whisks. I was five years old and treading chlorinated water in a concrete pool in Myrtle Beach. How I prayed, even though I didn't believe in Jesus, that my father would pluck me from the water and set me back on dry land. How I regretted instantly thinking I could make it on my own to the water slide, which was the color of a robin's egg. How when my father grabbed me from the deep end it was with one hairy arm. How water ran out my nose and burned my throat when I coughed. How I was scared of the water for three days after that.

I remembered a railroad tie, a broken pier jutting into cold Lake Erie on the shores of Crystal Beach, Canada, where I stayed with my best friend Sarah's family. How Sarah's family always rented a ramshackle beach house in a ramshackle beach community that profited from an amusement park that closed in 1989 that everyone including my parents and grandparents used to go to. How my mother told me she rode The Comet coaster when she was pregnant with me. How every time I looked at that ghostly roller coaster from the end of that jagged pier I used to squint at it, frozen in time, frozen seven years after my birth, frozen before I had a chance to ride it, and imagine my mother with her red feathered hair, riding it pregnant with me. How when Sarah and I jumped from that jagged pier we'd hold hands and curl our toes just in case we landed on rocks when we hit the water.

I remembered the smell of model airplane fuel. The sweet sticky smell of model airplane fuel. How my father kept it in little bottles on his work bench in the basement. How the bottles were tiny because model airplanes don't require much fuel. How the fuel was the color of pink lemonade and the bottles were shaped like old lady face potions. How next to the fuel there was model airplane resin, that in its powder form was softer than baby talcum and whiter than sugar. How I loved to sift my hands through it. How I loved that my dad had stuff like this in our basement. Jars with skull and crossbones symbols on them. How in school they told us to stay away from stuff like that, those pale pink potions that powered fiberglass Nazi warplanes.

I remembered eating vanilla pudding pops in the summer. How we used to buy them from Crances Superette from a woman named Mary who worked behind the counter. How Mary hung a yellow fly strip by the milk freezer. How she had short brown hair that looked like a winter cap. How she lived in the apartment upstairs and had big round glasses and a sad wistful smile.
...


PS. The picture above was taken July 4 in Sarasota's Bayfront Park.

Panhandling Take 1.

Good morning.

It's 8:30 a.m. Joe is still sleeping. We're headed to SGI for a week in the Florida Panhandle. (We're staying here.) It was Joe's plan to wake up at 8, but of course he's still zonked. I've considered blasting a Toby Keith song in an effort to wake him, but that's probably not the best idea.

I have lofty post ideas for this vacay. My only concern is that I won't have wireless. If that's the case and I'm MIA you'll know why.