I loved two men

There are strange, strange things that happen, things so inexplicable you can only understand them after years have gone by. The camera zooms away, or zooms upward, so that more and more of the picture is revealed.

I loved two men. Loved – that’s the wrong word. It wasn’t a sexual thing, I swear, because both men were known to be gay. They were also arrogant, fiercely intelligent, and possessed of a certain social and media-related power. They were tin gods, in other words, and how I could have remained so attached to them, for so long, I will never know.

Maybe I was flattered when they allowed me to sit at the edge of their bright circle of influence. Maybe. I certainly courted their attention, and got bits of it, crumbs. When I was about to walk away in rage or dismay, I’d be tossed another crumb.

Where do I start? The parallels between these two just came to me tonight. It seems incredible I never saw it before.

For one thing, they’re both dead. They both died of sudden, violent, catastrophic strokes, literally dropping in their tracks. They were not young, but neither were they terribly old. Before they died, they both said and did things to me which now make me gasp at the level of casual cruelty.

Paul was my teacher, so many years ago now it seems like another lifetime, another universe. It was back in 1991. He taught anthropology at a community college in a small town, a strange thing, because I was to find out later he had two Masters degrees and a PhD. If he was so brilliant, as he seemed to think he was, why was he stuck in this backwater?

The Anthropology of Religion wasn’t about religion at all. It was mostly about Haitian voodoo and the power of certain plants to paralyze and zombify – for the great zombie tradition comes from Haiti, where death can be created at will, then revoked with a snap of the fingers.

I was enthralled. In the classroom, this man was charisma personified. He just seemed to know so much. When I saw Paul do mediumship at a spiritualist church, I was enraptured. I had never known anyone like this, a veritable sorceror, and he was actually allowing me to sit at the same table and talk about the same subjects. More or less.

How I stayed friends with Paul through the years is simple – I put in virtually 100% of the energy. Had I let it drop, the whole thing would have fallen apart. Why was I so desperate? I don’t understand it, looking back, except that I wanted some of his zombie power. I already had power of my own, but I didn’t see that then. Whenever it threatened to show itself, Paul would summarily clap it down.

Meanwhile, another friendship – this one really not a friendship at all, but a correspondence, for I never actually met the man. Call him Lloyd, because that was his name, so we might as well use it. He had been drama critic at the local paper for a thousand years or so, then music critic, more or less staying in the same job for all of his working life. Not turning left, not turning right.

As a critic, he could deal blows and thrust his sword with a nearly-indifferent cruelty that was sometimes breathtaking. It was enormously entertaining for people to watch Lloyd eviscerate other people – a blood sport. When they themselves were the subject, their enthusiasm withered somewhat.

One day, wanting to entice him or at least attract his attention, I sent Lloyd a column I had written in my local paper – what was it about? Elizabeth Taylor’s visit to Eaton’s, I think – and to my surprise, I got a very nice handwritten reply, quoting some lines from my column and saying he was going to steal them: “I only steal from the best.”

After that initial contact, it wasn’t as if we passed notes in school or sat around the campfire roasting weenies. As I said, it wasn’t a normal friendship. We never had coffee, never even talked on the phone. But the correspondence went back and forth for more than fifteen years. Mostly forth, for if I hadn’t kept it going it would have immediately died. I don’t know why I let myself in for such treatment, but I did.

In both cases, the connection waxed and waned, but there were bright moments. Occasionally Paul the medium acknowledged that I maybe-just-maybe had had some valid psychic experiences of my own (but more often than not he dismissed them as “dangerous” or “just a fantasy”). Lloyd sent me Christmas cards – yes, he really did, handwritten, cheery things that you would never know came from someone most people perceived as a heartless Scrooge.

I will cut to the chase, because this could become book-length. There was a breaking point in each case. I had lost touch with Lloyd after he finally retired from his only job, tried to leave a message on a blog he was keeping, and heard nothing. Then suddenly – and this was unlikely, because he hated technology – there he was on Facebook! Stupidly, I messaged him and said, “I hope this gets to you.”

What I got back was, “This was a mistake. I’m not on Facefuck, so you can go fuck yourself. I hope this gets to you.”

I spent considerable time spinning around in confusion, telling myself maybe it wasn’t really him (it was), and then – one day – receiving a kind of vindication when a friend of mine – OK, a psychiatrist – said, “It’s well-known that this man is the most sarcastic, vindictive, narcissistic, selfish, ruthless, heartless. . . “ – and on and on. OH! I thought I was the only one, and here this man’s patients – apparently more than one – had been seared as well. In fact, maybe that’s what sent them to the psychiatrist.

I can’t remember ever being that angry, but I had a plan. Paul had taught me all about it, in The Anthropology of Religion. I wasn’t trying to do harm – of course not. My plan was to show Lloyd  the error of his ways, to hold up a mirror or a magnifying glass, and to make him feel even a degree of the pain that he had caused other people. I had no idea if I was applying the principles correctly, so I winged it, using Haitian music, a great deal of jewelry and beads and crosses, candles, incense, dance, and written statements of intent. Silly, really, but  I just had to do something - he had just told me to go fuck myself! I thought he was my friend, or my "something" at least. When I made the doll it seemed extreme, but what is a doll but a toy, an effigy, a likeness? This wasn’t him. The person I was trying to reach was probably unreachable.

So what happened? Exactly nothing. So that was that. I filed it under "useless attempts to get someone's attention". 

Fast-forward several years, and the news came (in the paper he used to write for) that he had suddenly died, and his life was gone. The saddest thing was realizing that his colleagues (most of them dragged out of retirement for comment) had to awkwardly scrape together nice things to say about him. I didn’t react well and posted something pretty harsh on my blog, which I took down when I realized it was hurting people who had cared about him.

But suddenly, now that he was gone, he was this bon vivant, this sparkling wit, this Oscar Wilde of the Lower Mainland, and far from hating and fearing him, performers had lined up to receive his vicious barbs as a sort of badge of honour. Right. Others said he had wasted himself and should have written for the New Yorker or some other publication that mattered. The saddest thing of all was when someone said that after working with him for 25 years, no one knew a single thing about him – where he was from, if he had a family or an education or any working experience prior to his decades at the Sun. Outside the office or the concert hall, he was a cipher.

My anger fizzled out in pity. My mojo seemed ridiculous, which I suppose it was. I had not affected the outcome of this strange, sad story. But stranger still was what happened years later, and that’s the thing that makes the hair on my scalp prickle. Paul’s death was so similar, it was downright eerie.

Paul too was celebrated in his tiny circle, but his wit was known to be cutting. He seemed to love busting people down to size. Like Lloyd, he had his limited little fiefdom, and stomped away from the spiritualist church he had founded when the other members didn’t want to do things his way.

He lived far away by then, and we had an on-off correspondence, but when I excitedly began to write to him about some information I had received about George Gershwin, at first he seemed supportive and almost enthusiastic. I sent him several documents about how friends and family members had actually “seen” him after his death – a dire and restless death, the kind that sometimes leaves behind that unhappy camper known as a ghost.

I wanted to know more about it, and surely Paul was perfect to ask about ghosts. Mr. Medium himself!  But then I sent something that wasn’t an attachment, but included in the body of the email. His response told me that he hadn’t read any of the other stuff at all.

He told me that, “speaking as a psychotherapist” (which he wasn’t), I should “approach such manifestations with extreme caution. They may either be mere fantasies to restore a sense of personal power and worth, or out-and-out delusions born of your psychologically fragile state of “

BLAH, BLAH, BLAH.

I don’t know what it is about me and assholes, me and men like that. I didn’t marry one, at all, and I don’t think there are any left in my life – for Paul just dropped in his tracks, like Lloyd, in a stroke.

But not before my mojo. For after all, Paul taught me about mojo, and how to create it. I was very specific. I wrote out my wishes, and specifically stated that I meant no physical harm to either Paul or his partner (also named Paul). But it was full-on, and I made a doll in his likeness, with his face on it. It was part of the ritual.

But I never expected anything to come of it. It was mostly a catharsis for myself.  It felt eerie when I heard he had died like that, with a lightning-stroke like Lloyd whose little empire crumbled straight down like a tower being demolished. I did not feel good, I was not glad. It felt even worse to find out that his devoted spouse of 25 years had been left completely in the lurch. He wasn’t just left with no money. He was left with a yawning abyss of debt, something like $200,000.00, which he had known nothing about. The spiritualist church had decided to put the past aside and try to help “young Paul” (for he was much younger than the other Paul, and somewhat intellectually challenged, certainly no threat to his many-degreed spouse).

Something woeful had been revealed, not just about these men and their talent for turning their pain outward and inflicting it on others. There was something shadowy about both of them - they were not what they seemed. But what I really didn't want to see was what it revealed about me. Why did I ever suck up to people like this – not once, but twice? These weren’t powerful men at all. Their darts had entertained me – for a while. Casual cruelty can be vastly entertaining, as long as it's not about you.

There will be no more mojos, no more dolls, nor any of that stuff, ever again. I don’t want to need it, and I won’t. I only did it because I felt so damn powerless, and regretted my attachment to a couple of arrogant assholes. I don’t know why all these parallels, for it looks like there are quite a few, and why I did not see any of this until just now. But I do know something for sure, something I have believed for quite a long time now, and as years pass I believe it more all the time.

The way you die is the way you live. It’s an accurate reflection, like a tree reflected in water. Energy, charge, karma, charisma, whatever it is, can only build up in the machine for so long before it backfires. If someone holds up a mirror or a magnifying glass, the concentrated rays can set the person on fire until they are completely consumed.

I had watched two parallel examples of how a person’s life can implode by the way they conducted their life. It was a very strange kind of self-destruction, not by cigarettes or alcohol or drugs, but by a sort of personal self-immolation. I don’t think I stood there with the match, because I don't have that sort of power, but I was powerless to put the fire out. They had created it, fed it, banked it. I don’t know what kind of brokenness lay behind that level of rancor and bile, and I don’t care now because I am busy living my own life. But empty is empty. Leaving the person you love the most in massive debt is not love, nor is leaving your friends with no clue, no trace of who you have been. It’s abandonment. Abandonment of life, abandonment of self, abandonment of those who have made the fatal mistake of caring whether you live or die.

POST-BLOG.  A couple of times I've had to take posts down because people bolted in the other direction. But I simply needed to write this, though I know it is odd and a bit creepy. Long after Lloyd died, I found some references to his death and the way it was perceived that I found intriguing, not to mention revealing. They mostly highlighted his great narcissist's talent for throwing people off-balance, in life and (incredibly) even after his death. One writer was incensed that people had said things like, "He should have been writing for the New Yorker!", implying that he had ended up in a permanent backwater. The protest kind of proved the point, exposing Vancouver's "world-class" pretense like the raw nerve of a tooth. Another person stated in their blog that they were grateful to Lloyd for teaching them to write, but made it clear that "he wasn't a perfect person, and would have been insulted to be portrayed that way". She then went on to say that he was difficult to deal with, isolated himself for weeks at a time, cutting people off and making himself unreachable, and was known to inexplicably dump longtime friends as casually as Sweeney Todd dumping his victims into the pit. 

Louie Louie: This really IS a dirty song!

You know, not every day is a good day. Some days are crap-ass, and this is one of those days. Not that anything bad has happened. It's just that nothing has happened AT ALL.

So I look around for things to post, but mostly they look around for me, because I'm always bumping into stuff. I found a great photo, from the 1940s I think, with a modern-day time traveller in it. No doubt a masterpiece of photoshopping, but I've seen that sort of thing before, even in films, and have posted on it (see Time Traveller on Blackfriars Bridge).

time-traveller-on-blackfriars-bridge.html

This, well. If you lived through this, and let's hope you didn't, there was a great to-do about "obscene" lyrics in the song (because the words were basically indecipherable). We used to say there was a "dirty" version and a "clean" version of  Louie Louie, but I doubt that because no one ever found any evidence. I think the whole thing was a sublime example of the mondegreen, or misheard lyric, which I recently posted about. It's possible to see things, hear things, and probably even taste and touch and smell things that aren't really there: thus Finding Bigfoot and all those ridiculous ghost-hunting TV shows. But for some reason, this seems to be particularly true of hearing things.

The urban myth that the FBI spent years pursuing an investigation of the song is true. They played it forwards and backwards, upside-down and sideways, and couldn't find anything obscene (though the Kingsmen still turned out to be one-hit wonders. Just a coincidence? I. . . DON'T. . . THINK. . . SO!) I was going to post all of the FBI's smudgy, blacked-out typewritten correspondence about this, but it bored the piss out of me, so I didn't. It's even more boring than all that blacked-out shit about Roswell.

BUT! Listen to this again, and at exactly 0:55, the drummer (having fumbled his drumstick) yells "FUCK!"

Well, it might be fuck, or it might be something else. But it's Thursday, the week is dragging ass, and it should be Friday, so here it is at last, proof that Louis Lou-EYE really IS an obscene song.

POST-IT-SCRIPT: In 1972 The Kingsmen were found at the bottom of the Hudson river wearing cement overshoes, right next to Jimmy Hoffa. Just a coincidence?

You decide.

POST-POST. Oh all right. This thing would be incomplete without at least SOME examples of the kind of bullshit that went on with the FBI or the CIA or whatever (because obviously, Louie Louie posed a serious threat to national security). The reproductions of these documents are so plug-ugly that I tried to find a way to dress them up a little, paste flowers on or turn them pink or something, but it just didn't work.

This one is obviously a complaint from a citizen sent to the FBI. J. Edgar Hoover got a lot of fan mail back then, which he enjoyed reading while dressed in women's clothing. (See related post: Was Herman Goering a Transvestite?): 

was-hermann-goering-a-transvestite-you-decide

Can y'all read this? It makes for some boring reading. But this was the kind of dirty-minded thinking that led to the fracas around Louie Louie. People were hearing whatever they wanted to hear, and whatever they wanted to hear was filthy, I tell you. . . filthy!

This is sort of like, kinda-like, what they thought they heard, or maybe some people thought they heard. I can only imagine the salacious delight of these FBI agents as they listened to the thing 500 times while drinking martinis, carefully deciphering those filthy, dirty lyrics which included such words as "girl" and "park" and "awaiting". 

But as usually happens (eventually), sanity prevailed. The FBI had to admit they couldn't make out a damn thing in those lyrics, that it was just one big mush-mouthed jumble.

We could have told them that, right from the beginning! But no, J. Edgar was having a slow day and needed a project. Should've gone out and bought a hat with a veil and a new pair of heels.

Visit Margaret's Amazon Author Page!

Haunted by Harold

OK, then. I've told you all about Lloyd synchronicity, and in case you don't remember what it is, it's examples of the name Lloyd coming up over and over and over again through the course of a single day.

It happens and happens, and has been happening for months and maybe even years. I've had as many as five a day, and once I had four in a single movie (a little British comedy called The Wrong Box), but the ones that really make my scalp prickle aren't just things like seeing the name Lloyd on the side of a train or on a street sign or a realtor's sign or TV credits or a dog's ID tag. . . they're examples of actually SEEING Harold Lloyd, usually when I least expect it.

It happens fairly frequently on Turner Classic Movies, and this isn't so very unusual because they have championed the re-release of many of his magnificent silent comedies. But tonight. Oh God. I was minding my own business watching William Shatner's Weird or What? (one of my favorite educational programs) when an ad break came on, and. . .

And there was this woman dangling from the hands of a huge clock.

A Safety Last! clock. An ICONIC clock. WTF? Have I fallen into the freaking Fourth Dimension or something?

Not only was the ad in black and white, it had little lines running down it to make it look like an old movie. She wasn't dressed like Harold Lloyd, but still, the derivation was obvious.

A Harold Lloydian, Safety-Lastian, clock-dangling, cliff-hanging, danger-defying, "high and dizzy" thrill-picture scene in a goddamn Cover Girl cosmetics ad!

Listen, ever since I started researching my novel The Glass Character, and all through the writing of it, and even now, long post-Lloyd, this has been happening. It seems to come in waves, and now I'm in some sort of a bizarre tidal wave.

When I fell in with Harold Lloyd and his legend, I fell into enchantment. A state not so easy to enter, or, for that matter, to escape. I wish somebody would tell me what it all means.

http://margaretgunnng.blogspot.ca/2013/04/the-glass-character-synopsis.html

http://members.shaw.ca/margaret_gunning/betterthanlife.htm

The church at the corner of Gloria and Lloyd

I have a relationship with the unknown.

I mean the unknown unknown. I mean the what-the-hell-is-this, why am I experiencing all these strange coincidences (also known as "God's way of remaining anonymous"), all these strange happenings and feelings that make me wonder if there is indeed an Other Side.

My most laden experience, the one producing the richest vibrations, has been with Harold Lloyd. Since I began to research his life for my novel The Glass Character (just lately accepted for publication, to my delight), or even before that, I felt a weird sort of resonance with him. It reminded me of one of his funniest early films, Haunted Spooks, in which his thick black hair stands on end (a running gag created with electric current - I don't know how he survived it) when he sees a flour-covered little black kid running around like a baby ghost.

I suppose I should start at the beginning and recount the whole thing, all my experiences from early childhood, but I'd be here all day so I can only talk about last week., or at least the last few years. And that feeling, that feeling that "someone" is there, almost always on my left side, outside my body, in a sort of person-shaped bubble. Does he say anything? Not really, but I feel his presence or vibes or whatever-it-is I feel about people before I even see them.

In these visitations, he's always the older Harold, the never-mellowed Harold who remained fiercely interested in life, in women, and in a thousand different activities, some charitable, some just plain weird (such as taking something like half a millon 3D photos of naked women and paying them $50 each, which often included sex).  But when I feel a presence like this - and believe me, I realize that this could be my imagination - it's pure essence, as if I am sipping the person through a straw.

So what was/is Harold like? Hard to explain. A complex man who seemed simple, even thought of himself as simple. Was he interested in this sort of thing, in the other world? He was too practical for that, a Midwestern boy raised and baptised in fundamentalist Christianity in the Bible belt. And yet, and yet.

I don't know much about masonic orders or Shriners or any of that stuff, except that it involves funny hats and go-carts. It's mainly, as I see it, benevolent, but there are always rumors. Not only was Harold involved: he rose through the ranks of masonry (if that's what it's called) all the way to Imperial Potentate of the Shriners: and he looked decidedly un-silly  in that hat. 

But there are other things apart from Harold Lloyd, lots of things, hard to describe. Not just knowing when the phone will ring, but who is on the other end and (this is the signifcant part) what they are going to say. "Guessing" the name of my newborn niece before anyone told me. I'm not a psychic, don't get me wrong, and most people who call themselves psychics vastly overestimate their abilities (or are outright frauds, like that sickening, grating Long Island Medium on TLC, the biggest display of phony producer-driven "magic" I've ever had the misfortune to half-see before I bailed).

There's another part of it however. Though we're out of touch now, I was once close friends with a professional spiritualist medium, a university professor with two masters' degrees and a PhD in anthropology. I saw him perform his mediumship in a spiritualist church, a rapid blur of connected images that, to be honest, didn't make much sense to me, though the audience was quick to pick up meanings that may or may not have been there.

Then there was my violin teacher, a psychic healer steeped in the ancient, spooky traditions of Eastern European mysticism. This is strange territory and seems to tap in to things like werewolves and homunculi. He did healing on me, and it felt good, but I wonder now if it was really as transformative as it was supposed to be. He was a loving figure however, benevolent and eager to help people,  so I was never afraid of him or of his unusual ministrations. And yet, and yet, when I experienced a huge personal crisis in 2005, he wasn't there for me, and later on he accused me of abandoning him. This hurt me more than I can say.

I ran into a bulwark of belief that has always confounded me. Everything has to be a "lesson", everything has to  happen for a reason, even if in truth things are  just one big appalling blob of adversity. This is a subtle way, I can't help but feel, of saying "it's your fault", or, at very least, "you needed the lesson."  I won't even go into how inhuman this belief system is for people who have lost a child or otherwise experienced nearly-unbearable grief.

Are psychics and mediums and the like really in touch with some other dimension? Am *I* sometimes in touch, or is my imagination making my scalp prickle like Harold? I've seen auras, or certainly sensed them. No matter how phony someone's public act, I see through it in two seconds. This may just be the human sense that gives us a nose for these things, a survival skill.

And yet.

They say there are no coincidences, but the Lloyd synchronicity, which at one point was so thick I was getting four or five examples a day, seemed to be smearing butter all over my skepticism. I watched a little movie, a British comedy called The Wrong Box, and saw four examples of Lloyd - maybe five - in the credits, the names of the actors, the Tontine list which was the backbone of the whole thing. Face it, Lloyd is just not that common a name. Another time we were driving along the highway to somewhere and bisecting it was a road called Lloyd Avenue.

"That's stupid," I said to my husband. "There can't be a road just sitting there in the middle of nowhere. And especially not a Lloyd Avenue."

But then came the topper. I turned my head to the right and saw a huge brick building, also just sitting there, butted right up against the busy highway, totally out of place. I looked at the sign and "kvelled": it said Gloria Evangelical Temple.

Gloria was the name of Harold's first child. And there was her temple, right at the corner of Gloria and Lloyd.

Another time I was watching an old Twilight Zone episode and looked at the credits and saw  the name Suzanne Lloyd. That's the name of Harold's granddaughter, now CEO of Harold Lloyd Entertainment. It wasn't her, of course, but it was someone with the same name.

Just a coincidence? I! Don't! Think! So!

Things don't levitate by themselves or rise in the air, at least not so far,  but reality is sometimes a weird mobius strip playing endlessly and curving back on itself. Harold was an accomplished professional magician from boyhood (made money off it as a kid), even after he lost half his right hand in an accident. He could make things disappear, then reappear with an enigmatic smile.

There were the three gold beads.  A stupid story, really, but I've come this far, so I'll tell it anyway. I had a necklace made of tiny figures that were meant to represent my four grandchildren, and the beads were used as spacers. I had never owned anything like them. When I decided to mount the figures on a gold hoop earring and put it on a chain, something happened. One of the beads was missing. It just vanished. I don't remember dropping it. I got down on my hands and knees - it was doubtful I'd be able to match these, so I needed it back badly - and stayed down there a long time, going over every fibre of the rug.

Then I vacuumed the entire surface of the bedroom, sifting through all the dirt and fibres, then vacuumed again. Nothing.

I had to give up and try to find something else to use as spacers, but as so often happens in cases like this, I forgot about it and put the whole thing away.

Months went by, and though I was still pretty obsessed with Harold, I was shifting a bit, starting to move on. I was in my walk-in closet at the far end of the bedroom, as far from my jewellery case as possible. I felt something on the bottom of my foot.

It was the gold bead!

Seemed weird. Yes, weird, but. . .OK, somehow it got transported over there, on my foot? But wouldn't I feel it?

I went to put the bead back with all the other necklace material.

Wait a minute.

There was only one gold bead.

Even including the newly-found bead, I still had only two. I felt this phantom laughter, this twitting of my seriousness, this slightly nasty magician's satisfaction (for I have a theory that magicians are a little nasty, which is why I don't enjoy watching them perform) that seemed to say Harold was toying with me.

Fine then! I did it again! I put the bead back! I forgot about it! It was over, as far as I was concerned, and I could forget about the whole thing.

Months went by. The carpet was vacuumed several more times, and I obsessively checked in all the globs of filthy fluff for the lost bead. Nothing.

Then one day, getting dressed, just minding my own business, I saw something in the middle of the room, on the other side of the bed from my jewel case.

It shone a little. Jesus, no, it couldn't be!

I thought to myself: if I have only one bead in that case I will throw this sucker out the window, even get rid of the whole necklace. I opened the case and sighed to find there were two. My set of three was now restored.

Months went by. . . no, weeks I guess, when I was changing the lightbulb on a lamp in the other corner of the bedroom (I don't need to tell you how far away from the case). Then I felt something small and cold and hard under my foot.

For some obscure reason Harold wanted me to have four. A good trick on me. Things can't materialize out of nowhere, can they? But what about the loaves and fishes? Were they merely prestidigitation, or something infinitely more mysterious and profound?

I have a relationship with the unknown. I do not understand it and don't even want to go there, most of the time. Like a mirage, it can disappear if you pursue it. You see it in your peripheral vision, but when you turn your head. . .

When you turn your head, those three gold beads might just dematerialize, un-be, as they surely once were. As we surely all were, before we "were". And wherever that strange place is, there is no stopping us: we are all heading back there. Who knows when.

 

Dear Sir or Madam, will you read my book

    It took me years to write, will you take a look

Order The Glass Character from:

Amazon
http://www.amazon.com/-/e/B001K7NGDA

Barnes & Noble

http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/the-glass-character-margaret-gunning/1117863913?ean=9781927068885

Thistledown Press

http://www.thistledownpress.com/html/search/genre/Fiction/the_glass_character_p580.cfm

Chapters/Indigo
http://www.chapters.indigo.ca/books/the-glass-character/9781927068885-item.html?ikwid=the%

I don't understand this at all: Harold Lloyd synchronicity

When I started this blog some months ago, I had a sort-of theme in mind.

I wanted it to be basically an ad for my fiction, so maybe, just maybe, somebody-out-there might see it and take some sort of an interest.

I mean, somebody who might be able to help.

This didn't happen. Instead, I became more close-mouthed than ever about the subject of my latest (unpublished) novel, The Glass Character, a fictionalized account of the life and times of silent screen comedian Harold Lloyd.

You know: that Harold Lloyd. The ordinary fellow, looking a little geeky in his hornrimmed glasses, who ended up doing daredevil stunts such as hanging off the hands of a huge clock 20 stories up.

I can't get into the complex, often paradoxical life of Lloyd right now. Instead, I want to write about some (many!) examples of synchronicity I've experienced since I began to research and write about this man a couple of years ago.

Synchronicity being, as I understand it, coincidences that don't seem like coincidences because of their existential/emotional significance. Or, in this case, sheer numbers.

It started small. I'd see the name Lloyd on a street sign, on the side of a truck or train, on a realtor's sign, in movie credits, in novels, in magazine pieces, in - well, it could be anywhere.

This escalated over time. It became routine to get at least one Lloyd-sighting somewhere, every day. I mean, every day. Sometimes, there were two or three.

"Oh, you're just noticing it because that's what you're writing about," my friend claimed. Ahhhh, maybe. But when I watched an odd little British comedy called The Wrong Box, I counted, not one, not two, not three. . .

There were five references to the name Lloyd, in the credits (2), in the cast (2), and even in a list, the Tontine, which was the pivotal subject of the movie. When people got bumped off, their name was crossed off the list. One of those names was Lloyd.

Would it surprise you if I said I am still getting this, nearly two years later? The name Lloyd jumps out at me from a newspaper article (but never when I am looking for it!), a doctor's sign, a DOG'S name (yes, a dog!), or just about anywhere else. And in Googling "Lloyd synchronicity", I had to give up after only a few examples.

One blogger kept encountering the name Frank Lloyd Wright, over and over and over again. A Kathrine Lloyd had a display of art prints called Synchronicity. Elizabeth Lloyd Mayer, a psychiatrist, contributed to a paper on synchronicity, a subject both acknowledged and discredited in the psychiatric realm. (Nobody wants to look that crazy, so everyone thinks they're the only one.) And so on, and on, and on, probably into the hundreds, if not the thousands.

Maybe I should tell you about the gold beads, or maybe I shouldn't, because I can't guarantee I didn't misinterpret this. Along with being a serious painter, dog breeder, amateur scientist, photographer, and Imperial Potentate of the Shriners, Harold Lloyd was a master magician, adept at sleight-of-hand (and this in spite of the fact that he lost the thumb, index finger and half the palm of his right hand in an accident early in his career). He made things appear. He made things disappear, then appear again. The coin behind your ear, or -

OK. Things started to disappear, but only in a certain spot in the house. It was in the centre of the bedroom upstairs. Watches went away. Rings. Gold pens. It was weird.

Then came the gold beads. Or, rather, the one. I have a necklace with four tiny charms, each representing one grandchild. I had these mounted on a gold hoop earring, and for some reason I wanted to unfasten it, perhaps to change the order of the charms.

The four were separated by small gold beads.

I unfastened the hoop, and, ta-poinggggg. One of the gold beads shot across the room and disappeared.

I was plenty miffed. I crawled all over the bedroom floor on my hands and knees. No gold bead. Vacuumed and vacuumed, then searched the gritty, fuzzy contents. No gold bead.

It maddened me. I looked for another gold bead, and could not find one just like it.

So I sort of gave up. Months went by. Maybe a year. I was walking around in my bare feet in the opposite side of the bedroom from the ta-poinggggg, then felt something sticking on the sole of my foot.

"Aha!" I cried. "Lloyd, you've done it again!"

I put the gold bead into a tiny drawer in my jewellery box.

More time went by, maybe months. I was walking barefoot in another part of the bedroom. I felt something stuck to the bottom of my foot.

Oh no.

Maybe, somehow, had the gold bead jumped out of the drawer? Or what? I knew I didn't have another one. I had already given up and replaced all the beads with shitty-looking ones, and glued the hoop shut. No more ta-poingggggs for me.

So I put the bead in the drawer with the other one. But you're not going to believe what happened after that.

I now have three perfect gold beads in the drawer. Does this have anything to do with the fact that the rather odd, not-terribly-common name Lloyd keeps popping up every day, sometimes two or three different times in different contexts?

What does it all mean? Lloyd always looks to me as if it spells something backwards. It almost spells "dolly".

It maddens me, because right now I have no prospects at all. I think The Glass Character is the best thing I've ever written, and at the moment it looks like it will die on the vine because agents and publishers won't even read my covering letter before firing it back at me with a (quite literal) rubber-stamped rejection that makes form letters look respectful.

Harold, either lay off, or help me here! I have enjoyed your presence immensely, but I can't believe it has no other purpose than to provide an odd but enjoyable experience, the kind you wouldn't want to relate at a psychiatric conference.

After all. . . they might think you're crazy.