Message in a Bottle
As I was writing this to you, staring into the void and contemplating what these weekly little missives mean over a second glass of grenache, an enterprising little boy known to the staff and regulars of my favorite wine bar visited my table.
The kid was distributing little, cartoon stickers to every customer. My sticker depicted an octopus tentacle emerging from the ocean with a message in a bottle grasped in its tentacle. And there was my answer—that’s this whole gig. I write messages for bottles.
Synchronicity is the perception of a meaningful coincidence wherein an internal thought or sensation matches an external event without an apparent causal relationship between them. In my 20s, I lived in a state of perpetual synchronicity—everything mattered, had meaning, and pointed toward some self-affirming fate aligned with the machinations of the cosmos. I was Jung and dumb and swimming in condensed Joseph Campbell’s soup.
One friend from that era forged an entire lifestyle from synchronicity and still texts me about it whenever he experiences it. Until today, I envied him—by my 40s, I’d fallen out of this magic synchronization with the universe, thinking meaningless and chaos were more practical.
Now, in my mid-50s, I can see how stupid my falling out was and how it negates the entire premise of being human. We are meaning making machines—we can’t help but divine secrets, codes, grand plans and plots in our experience. It could be an evolutionary tic, a mutation, a fatal flaw, but it’s defining and I’m inclined to embrace it.
We tell stories to ourselves and each other, compare notes, entwine narratives and revel in side-quests that, through the smudged lens of introspection, look something like meaning. Then we jot it down, bottle it up, and throw it into an ocean of all possible outcomes on the off chance another randomly sentient complex of stardust might get it.
True story: When we were young winos, another friend and I drained a bottle of wine and replaced its contents with a note, which—naively—I signed before tossing into the Petaluma River. A few weeks later, the bottle greeted my return, atop my desk at the Argus-Courier, accompanied by a reply written by the river-keeper, David Yearsley, chiding me for littering. So, don’t do that
But…
Bottle ye messages while ye may.
If I were not already convinced you are funny and brilliant, this line would have done it - "I was Jung and dumb and swimming in condensed Joseph Campbell’s soup." That's pure genius. And I am also very taken with your entire premise. This line also, gets me where I live - "Then we jot it down, bottle it up, and throw it into an ocean of all possible outcomes on the off chance another randomly sentient complex of stardust might get it."
From one randomly sentient complex of stardust to another, WELL DONE!
In my 20s, I lived in a state of perpetual synchronicity—everything mattered, had meaning, and pointed toward some self-affirming fate aligned with the machinations of the cosmos. I was Jung and dumb and swimming in condensed Joseph Campbell’s soup.