Sometimes my life feels like a ball of yarn with both ends tucked in the inside and I have to pull at loops until the whole thing unravels. Once and everything. Sometimes there are more than two ends that attract each other like magnets, and clack through coincidences in life that seem like they were spat out by Screenwriter Plot Generator v2.0.
Last night I spoke to a friend I hadn’t spoken to for at least a half dozen years. We went to graduate school together in Iowa seventeen years ago, lived together with two other people, so I’v known him almost half my life. Last night, we were chatting and I realized I knew at one point he worked at Highmark, the super conglomerate insurance company. He lives in Pittsburgh with his wife and two children. I asked him if he knew ‘Mrs. Paul’sFishSticks’. (I am protecting her identity, sorry if there really is a Mrs. Paul’sFishSticks; it’s not you, baby.).
“You mean ole Stickers?”
“Yes. Ole Stickers”
“You know her?”
“Yes, she gave birth to me.” So my friend, working in a company with thousands of employees, knew my birth mother. Now, I was born near Pittsburgh. My family is from there. My parents now live in Greensburg, PA, their house being five minutes from Catholic Charities, the organization through which I was adopted. One of my close friends happened to move to Mt. Lebanon, right outside of Pittsburgh, near my Uncle, My friend lives there now and worked with my birth mother, who also lives in Pittsburgh.
I don’t believe in coincidence. But clearly the earth’s energetic grids have a secret transatlantic cable from my life right to Three Rivers Point. I can’t make anything of it yet. Who knows, maybe it means that all of these events are pushing me to go there and fulfill my destiny and buy a basketball accidentally printed with the Pirates logo on it and then bounce it down the aisles at Toys’R’Us and get busted and become mayor. I don’t know, but there’s always some activity in the landmass. But this gets the Serendipity Award of 2013 thus far.
My dog’s 18.5 years old. That’s about 130 human years. Take that, world’s oldest Japanese woman. Try living that long pooping outside and walking around naked with only a collar around your neck. I was trying to date the history of nicknames I’ve given my dog over the years. Anyone who’s had a dog knows you go through nickname epochs. One sticks, then it fades, there’s usually an interim spell where a bunch of new nicknames are tried out until a new one emerges, like conception. Thinking back I came up with these, from most recent to earliest:
Creamy Biscuits
Pumpkin Pie Head
Auggie Ben Doggie
Squashy Nugget
Poopies
Beasty Feast
Scrunchy Pies
Moosifer (when she is being naughty)
Lil Pooter (This was the first, in 1995).
I’ll keep adding to this as I go deep into hypnotherapy to recover memories from being in the womb and nicknames for my dog.
Good night and “BULLOCKS to DON REVIE!”
