The Question of Coincidence

sometimes, when I read aloud to students I carry this southern dialect. I imagine I'm Bob Dylan, or Woodie Guthrie...maybe Charles Bukowski...I draw out my S's and L's and like William Burroughs I swagger down the sidewalk slinging axioms. I imagine old folk singers--and the whistle of an old train sings in the back-drop like a painting.

A long time ago, I found this old copy of Down and Out in Paris and London, by George Orwell. I think of this book on occasion...much like Cold Dog Soup, and this other book that I can't recall the title of. The Orwell book is about a guy who makes his living in hotels and restaurants as a waiter. It's written a year before Miller's Tropic of Cancer, and if you like that book, you should definitely check out Down and Out. 

I read it and I was a waiter at the time. I knew this attorney from Texas when I was living in Portland. He was a smart guy and he lived in one of those tenement housing places where the hallway light is busted out and you can hear the cries of babies and domestic violence as you pass by doorways on your way to whichever dingy room you're going to. He didn't need to be there...I think he was doing it on purpose. He always seemed to me like a character in a Vonnegut book. Filled with irony and slapstick. I've been in many places like this. They are always depressing and you sit on milk crates and cast glances around at the cracked paint and it must be raining outside because the grey of the place permeates the senses. His room was partly underground so he only had half light from those cellar windows. But, it was comfy and clean...he had like 5 locks and a steel bracer on his door. It always reminded me of Down and Out. 

I lived in a trailer outside of Hartington, Nebraska in the early '90's. It wasn't a trailer park, but a field of wild grass with a scattering of similar trailers as if someone tossed them out there like dice. No roadways or paths, just a grass field you drove up to and parked next to. I had this old blue stationwagon that when parked next to the old trailer must have looked like a redneck version of an Ed Hopper painting. The trailer had brown shag carpet and a kitchen that rivaled any meth lab. At night, under the dim lamplight and glow of the TV, it seemed almost cozy, but under the harsh light of day it was depressingly grey. 

On Saturday mornings when me, Chad and Brad would clean the place from top to bottom we'd open both doors and all the windows and it was like that old skeleton ship the Mariner sails up from the South Pole on. We'd play something like Chili Peppers or Ministry and clean as the fresh air filtered the dinge from the place and we'd put out the lawn chairs and crack a beer and it seemed like life wasn't going to get better. This was surely the end, and we would talk and laugh. We all knew this couldn't be all there was. There had to be more and we racked our brains trying to figure a way off this forsaken desert.  

In "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner," the mariner stops a wedding guest, a close relative of the groom, and tells him the story of how he shot an albatross. I read this poem in high school, again years later as a graduate student and I've tried to teach it a few times. The first time was in Florida. I tried to have the kids draw pictures of certain particularly vivid images that fill the poem. Picture this....

'The ship was cheered, the harbour cleared,

Merrily did we drop

Below the kirk, below the hill,

Below the lighthouse top.'

Now this one from Farewell to Manzanar. 

'...and they were easing away from the wharf, joining the line of boats heading out past the lighthouse, into the harbor [...] from the wharf we waved goodbye [...] we watched until the boats became a row of tiny white gulls on the horizon. Our vigil would end when they slipped over the edge and disappeared.' 

Is this coincidence?

I once came to a conclusion, regarding something metaphysical...or maybe it was existential...whatever the case, I'm still thinking about this thing...this conclusive understanding I came to. I was probably in my mid-to late thirties the first time the notion occurred to me. The idea that there are no accidents. That everything is cause and effect. Like Bob Dylan telling us the whole wide universe is watching the chimes of freedom flashing, we are all of us connected--a grand cascading of dominoes. But does this point of view include the idea that like no accidents, there are no coincidences? 

Co-incident. At least two incidents simultaneously. Nothing within the semantic syntax implies that coincidence should be a surprise. Once when I was in high school I threw this party. We were sitting around the kitchen table playing drinking games with cards. It was early yet, and it was just good friends--still our group of pranksters. I was getting up to get a beer from the fridge and on a whim I peeled the top card from the deck sitting in the middle of the table and licked the back of it and simultaneously the number 10 flashed in my mind, and I slapped the card on my forehead and said, "10."

Everybody's jaws dropped and hooting and howling of the most appealing nature that I didn't even need to look at it and I took and slapped it back into place on top of the deck in the middle of the table, threw my hands up and walked out of the room. The place erupted. It was one of my finest moments...and I don't consider that flippantly. I'd consider it a coincidence tho. Not an accident. There seems to be no reason to believe my randomly saying the same number that I draw, is a result of a direct "cause and effect," relationship. And this is the test I apply to whether or not it's an accident or not. 

My thesis is only based on personal experience, but when I examine what seems to be an accident, I can trace it back to it's source. Thus the difference between accident and coincident lies in whether or not you can trace the thing to its source. I say source because it's a better term than "the beginning cause of the thing," because it's not a beginning. It's only the source of the most recent cause and effect thing that made that happen. I never go that far back...it gets wacky and I have other things I'd like to accomplish in life. I'm not some ga'dam Raskolnikov. Man talk about a head trip. I read Crime and Punishment over a summer. I drank the words. I became Raskolnikov. 

So when I tried to get the kids to draw pictures of it was a disservice to the kids. I didn't know the poem well enough to be confident. I can pull this off now and the kids are with me.   So anyway, I was talking about living in that old trailer, well my friend J.J. came out to see me and the first thing he says to me is, "Well man, here's to living like the Romans." 

I had no idea what that meant. Never even heard the phrase and to me I imagined having marble baths, steam and a lot of grapes and palm fronds. Anyway, I know I've told this story on more than a few occasions. Most of the time, J.J.'s in the same room, but I've told people this story who have no idea who J.J. is--so, suffer me one more time, for the blog. 

We decided to take the old station wagon to Lincoln. The ol' girl was a dirty mess of a heap. The attachment of the female gender to a car is not intended provocation, it's just what I did because I'd heard the same thing from other people around me. We never made it. We got stuck in the mud on a dirt road. Unbeknownst to me, dirt roads turn to mud in rain. I've driven dirt roads my entire life and never imagined it could turn to absolute slop. Like concrete when it's got just a bit too much water. That kind of muck in like 10 minutes it took from the time it started raining to the time we couldn't move. Luckily a farmer came by in the morning and pulled us out. 

It's night time and we were drinking beers on the side of some dirt road listening to Art Bell on the radio. J.J. gets out to take a leak and I start the car.

"What're you doin' esterle?"

"Nothin' man, I don't want the battery to go dead."

He finishes and goes to get in the car and I toss his smokes out the door and he's gotta go get them and as soon as he turned his back I put he car in gear and started rolling forward.

"What the fuck esterle!" 

"Don't worry man, I think that's a cop pulling up behind us." And he lunges to grab his smokes and reaches for the door and I tapped the gas and he had to walk alongside but he had a hold of the door. I sped up again and he had to jog.

"F'n' stop esterle you f'n asshole!" And I'm laughing like a crazy hyena and I slow down and he's running really fast so I slow gradually and he eventually is walking alongside the car cursing a bluestreak across my family's ancestry. But when he finally got in the car, I looked down and he wasn't wearing any shoes or socks. That blew my mind. 

But that's not really a coincidence, or an accident...intent or intention should rule out any possible coincidence or accident. Coincidences exist. When they are good, dann alles klar!