Way back in 1970, Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young recorded a catchy, but extremely silly song entitled Deja vu. It was the title track from one of their albums, actually. In hyperventilating harmony, the quartet gushed about the possibility of reincarnation: "And ya know, it makes me wonder,/What's goin' on,/Uuuuuuuuunder/The ground!"
I don't know about the ground, but sometimes I wonder, quite seriously, what's goin' on, uuuuuuuup in,/the air.
My religious friends maintain that some things in this world just can't be explained, and must be left to the mysterious ways of the Lord. My atheist friends maintain that there's nothing that can't be explained, given enough scientific theorizing and research. I'll let them duke that out.
In the meantime, I'm wondering about invisible signals from Out There Someplace. No, I'm not hearing voices. It's just that it's happened repeatedly in my life that I'll be going about my daylight business, spinning out the stream of consciousness which in real life is much more complicated than James Joyce or William Faulkner ever made it in a book, and some odd confluence of data comes together in the course of the day.
A very simple example (kind of a silly one, but it illustrates what I'm driving at): I'm a TV rerun addict. I got hooked on Nick at Nite back in the 1980s, and still watch its successor cable channel, TV Land. I've been a member of the Andy Griffith Show Rerun Watcher's Club since 1990.
I'll be muddling my way through the course of a typical day, and all of a sudden I'll remember a line from or an episode of TAGS, as we fans call the show, for example the episode where the goat eats the dynamite, (Otis: "You're not Uncle George! You're a goat!") and then later that day when I switch on the tube, voila, they're running the episode about the goat that eats the dynamite.
Okay, 249 episodes of TAGS were filmed between 1960, when the show came on the air, and 1968, when it went off the air, so you could argue that on any given day I have a 1-in-249 chance of thinking about that day's episode. Then again, if you factor in the possibility that I might not think about the show at all on a given day, the odds against my picking the right episode diminish significantly.
Still, it has happened often enough to catch my attention, and not just with regard to TAGS, but to other television shows, and movies as well. Just yesterday, around lunchtime, I was thinking of a scene from Stanley Kubrick's classic film 2001: A Space Odyssey. Last night at 7:00, when I switched on Turner Classic Movies, not only were they running 2001, but exactly the scene I had been thinking of.
Just what the heck is it about me and my TV set that we're so in tune with each other? Is it possible that among the electric shenanigans that the neurons in my brain are up to every waking hour, is something that makes me a sort of on-again-off-again TV antenna, capable of picking up a stray signal here and there, even as I'm buying a pound of cheese at Albertson's or putting the dog outside to pee on the lawn?
Maybe some of us are better at this sort of thing than others. I used to have a girlfriend, way over in Moscow, Russia, named Nadya. This was long-distance romance at its most inconvenient. Nadya and I actually got to see one another perhaps once every 18 months to two years, living as we did on different continents. And before the murderous competition of the Baby Bells and whatnot drove the cost of long-distance calling down to the dirt-cheap levels it's at now, I couldn't afford to call her on the phone very often. But almost invariably, when I did call, Nadya would say, "I knew you were going to call tonight," or "I was just thinking about you."
I'll bet you've had an experience like this, haven't you? You'll be thinking about someone you haven't thought of in a while, a friend, a relative, an enemy or maybe even a celebrity you don't think about very often. Next thing you know, you get a phone call or an e-mail from that person, or if it's a celebrity, you read their obituary in the newspaper. True vignette: many years ago, while living in Germany, I was going over the titles on my library shelf one afternoon, and happened to reach down a copy of James Baldwin's novel Go Tell It On The Mountain. I hadn't read it since college, or thought about it in years. I leafed through it, remembering when I had first read it, then put it back on the shelf and went about my business.
The next day I saw Baldwin's obituary in the International Herald-Tribune. "Looks like I bumped off another celebrity," I remarked in my diary, since this sort of coincidence had happened before.
Heads up, Reese Witherspoon: you don't want me thinking about you too often. Okay, darlin', you've been warned. Exercise, watch your diet, have regular check-ups and hope I find another movie star to admire from afar.
I had a particularly striking experience of this sort just this week, striking enough (and weird enough) to justify making some notes about this odd phenomenon of now-I'm-tuned-in, now-I'm-not.
Back in 1994, nearly 12 years ago, I was a federal employee sitting at my desk in suburban Washington, D.C. doing what federal employees do: woolgathering and waiting for it to be 5 p.m. so I could go home. I had a copy of the Washington Post that I'd picked up that morning, and picking idly through it, making my way leisurely to my horoscope and Calvin and Hobbes, I came across the odd story of Mitchell Rupe.
Mitchell Rupe was on death row in Washington state. He had been convicted of fatally shooting two Olympia bank tellers during a robbery in 1981 and was awaiting the noose. (Capital punishment in the state of Washington is hanging.)
Rupe came up with an extremely original way of cheating the hangman. He went on a prolonged eating binge. Somehow, in addition to the prison food, he managed to smuggle so much junk food into the joint, and gobble it all down, that his weight ballooned to more than 400 pounds. Then, as his conviction was going through the mandatory appeal process that all death penalty cases go through, his lawyer pitched the notion to the judge that Rupe must not hang. Being as fat as he was, his lawyer argued, there was now the possibility that if he were hanged he would be decapitated, and decapitation is "cruel and unusual punishment."
The judge bought the story. Rupe had eaten his way off death row.
I was writing a letter to Nadya that week, as I often did in those days, and like a good letter-writer I was in the habit of tucking in pictures, newspaper clippings and other items of interest. I found this item so curious, one of those things that ends up in the "weird news" roundup of the tabloids, that I clipped it and tucked it in with my letter, to give Nadya, who had never been to America, a glimpse of the absurdities that often attend the American criminal justice system.
The letter was mailed off to Moscow, and that was the last thought I gave Mitchell Rupe for more than 11 years.
Wednesday, February 8, 2006: I'm driving my car across Chula Vista in the bright morning sunshine, returning home after running some errands. Just as I'm crossing the intersection of Hilltop Drive and H Street, I suddenly remember the story about the fat guy who beat the rope with a regimen of twinkies and ding-dongs back in the mid-1990s. I do not remember his name. I cross the intersection, continue on my way and my thoughts very quickly move on to other things.
1 p.m., same day: I decide to drop in at my favorite Chula Vista cafe, Ernie's Diner, for some lunch. That morning I had picked up a copy of the San Diego Union-Tribune, but had not had a chance to look at it yet. I walk into Ernie's with the newspaper tucked under my arm, head for the outdoor patio in back (I like Ernie's because you can eat outdoors and enjoy the California sunshine) and order my usual. My waitress friend Timoko brings me a glass of wine.
While waiting for my salad, I sip my wine and begin perusing the U-T. On page A4, about halfway down the left side of the page, I glimpse this mini-item:
Spared convict dies
after lengthy illness
SPOKANE, Wash.--Mitchell Rupe,
a former death row inmate
once found too obese
to hang, died at the Washing-
ton State Penitentiary
in Walla Walla yesterday
after a long illness, a prison
spokeswoman said. He was
51 and died in the prison hos-
pital of liver disease.
The Associated Press story recounted Rupe's tale in one additional paragraph, concluding that he had weighed about 270 pounds when he died.
To my atheist-materialist friends who will shrug this off with "coincidence" and go back to watching American Idol, I would respond only that as coincidences go, it's an extremely strange one. To my religious friends who will see agency in this snapshot of deja fat before they go back to watching American Idol, I can only respond, why in the world would God want to bring me "full circle" on something so utterly bizarre, which certainly falls under the heading of Useless Information unless I myself happen to be binging on twinkies these days, which I'm not?
Probably the same reason he wanted to remind me not to miss the episode about the goat that ate the dynamite.
And so to breakfast.
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