Baptism

Yesterday morning (July 2), I breakfasted at a coffee shop where big lettering on the wall behind the front counter proclaims, "Tasting coffee, not only is a taste of the enjoyment, it is a physical and psychological baptism."

I'm pretty sure that if drinking coffee is a physical baptism for you, you're doing it wrong. Psychological, though? It can be. I vividly remember that one of the first things I did after resigning from the CJCLDS on February 14, 2002, was drink my first ever cup of coffee, doing it for no other reason than that it had been forbidden -- like Gibreel Farishta stuffing his face with dead pigs in The Satanic Verses, I thought at the time, noting the date -- and I did think of it explicitly as an "anti-baptism," as a ceremonial rite of passage into the ranks of the no-longer-Mormon.

I mailed in my resignation letter to church headquarters that day, but then when they wanted me to jump through some more hoops to finalize the thing -- meeting with the local bishop and whatnot -- I didn't bother. To this day I'm not sure whether they still consider me to be technically a member or not. Am I a "dry Mormon" -- a person who is Mormon-like in their general lifestyle and outlook but is not a member ("dry" meaning not baptized) -- or a "Jack Mormon" -- a church member who doesn't attend services or live the approved lifestyle (the equivalent of a "lapsed Catholic")? Possibly, as suggested by that "Jack dry" message, both to some degree.

As I ate my sandwich and sipped the devil's brew, I read a bit of Last Call, the Tim Powers novel I've been reading for sync-prompted reasons. Two of the female character, while physically in Caesar's Palace in Las Vegas, enter a visionary state in which they have an audience with the goddess Isis. The goddess accepts one of the two as "my daughter, who pleases me" (clearly alluding to the language used at Jesus' baptism), and the other, who has previously been fighting to obtain the daughter-of-Isis role for herself, renounces that claim and vows to be a true friend to the one the goddess has chosen. Immediately after this,

An idea was conveyed then, something like bathe, or cleanse or be baptize, and [there] appeared a clear picture of a vast lake behind an enormous man-made dam.

Nothing like a physical baptism occurs at that time, but the two women shortly find themselves back in Caesar's Palace, discovering that during the visionary encounter they had physically been sitting at the bar drinking quinine water which they had no memory of ordering -- suggesting that, as in the inscription at the coffee shop, their baptism somehow took the form of drinking a liquid rather than being immersed in or sprinkled with it. The second woman then proceeds to order a hamburger and a beer -- things she had abstained from before in order to qualify herself for the role of "queen" and daughter of Isis -- and explains to her at first uncomprehending friend that this is a way of cementing her vow of friendship:

I just now ate red meat, probably cooked on an iron grill, and I drank alcohol! I've unfitted myself for the queenhood! I've totally pledged my allegiance to you now . . . .

So as with my own "un-baptism" on which I had just been reflecting, we have the consumption of what was formerly forbidden, precisely because it was formerly forbidden, in a way that is almost ceremonial and serves as a way of formally enacting a spiritual decision.

"So, dry Jack," I thought to myself, "when are you going to get yourself baptized?"

The thought briefly crossed my mind that I could be baptized again by one of the churches -- the CJCLDS or the Catholics or, hell, even the True Jesus Church or something -- but the sentence immediately came to mind with great clarity: "That is not the way." This was followed by the mental voice of Greg Carlwood saying, as he often does at the beginning of his podcast, "This is the way, Higherside Chatters!"

At first I took this as an indication that recent episodes of that podcast might hold some synchronistic clues about the form my baptism should take, but that quickly proved to be a dead end. Instead I decided to search the Book of Mormon for the exact phrase "this is the way." It occurs exactly once, at the end of 2 Nephi 31. As it happens, this chapter has a lot to say about baptism, and specifically about the need "to be baptized, yea, even by water!" (v. 5). Baptism means baptism, immersion in actual water, not some other act of vaguely equivalent symbolism.

That night, I found myself wondering whether Lady Issit, the murdered mother of one of the characters in Last Call was a real person from history, like Bugsy Siegel. To check, I ran a web search for "issit" "bugsy" -- and the first results were etexts of The Satanic Verses, the very novel I had just referenced in connection with my coffee un-baptism. As it happens, there's a passing reference to a sitcom featuring, among many other alien characters, "Bugsy the giant dung-beetle from the Crab Nebula"; and then elsewhere in the novel, one of the characters, stuttering, says "iss iss issit" for "sit." A pretty strange coincidence.

This morning (July 3), I finished Last Call. The two women do in the end get "baptized" by bathing in Lake Mead. Supernatural beings try to prevent them from doing so, but they fight them off with, of all things, a chip. This is a poker chip from the Moulin Rouge (the short-lived Vegas casino, not its famous Parisian namesake), which was given to them by supernatural means after the meeting with Isis. The women first use the chip as a sword and finally end up eating it. (Yeah, it's kind of a strange novel.)

What does Moulin Rouge mean, anyway? I looked it up. "Red windmill."

After my morning classes, I had several hours of free time, and I began to feel an urgent need to get baptized immediately. On the road, I passed an irrigation canal with a sign that said, in English as well as Chinese, "Beware of deep water. Swimming prohibited." Beware is a word closely associated with the Ides of March, which is the date I was baptized, on my eighth birthday. And earlier I had been thinking of "baptism"-like acts consisting of doing the prohibited because it is prohibited. So while the sign looked on the surface like a warning not to get baptized, I interpreted it as the opposite. "Just follow my yellow light," I thought, quoting lyrics from Of Monsters and Men, "and ignore all those big warning signs." The coffee shop with the baptism inscription is the same place that has the Emily Dickinson lines I posted about in "Golden light, and going 'overseas'."

A few minutes later, I saw an advertisement for "Golden Ratio potato chips." The combination of golden and chips seemed potentially meaningful.

Then I passed someone wearing a blue-green T-shirt that said "Don't follow the wave" -- could be interpreted lots of ways -- and then another T-shirt on which was written, inside a big blue-green circle, "No place like Earth. No time like the present." In other words, it's now or never.

Not in an irrigation canal, though, obviously. I changed into shorts, a Hawaiian shirt, and slides and had Google Maps take me to the nearest beach. As I approached I could see wind turbines up ahead and thought it was a pity they were all gray instead of red. No moulins rouges. Then, as I turned a corner and had almost arrived at my destination, I found myself facing one that, unlike the others, did have some red on its blades:

Un moulin en partie rouge after all.

I parked, walked down a long stretch of wet sand and barnacled rocks, and waded out into the warm olive-colored waters of the Taiwan Strait. The place was completely deserted, except for a few little egrets in the shallows and some terns or something overhead.

"You're crazy. This is a crazy thing to do," an inner voice helpfully informed me. Yeah, well, not-being-crazy is pretty low on my list of priorities these days.

The water deepened very gradually, and I had to wade pretty far out just to get waist deep. "Am I actually going to do this?" I thought. "I am. Effunde spiritum tuum, Domine, super servum tuum, ut opus hoc faciat in sanctitate cordis." I sank to my knees on the soft sand, held my breath and, pushing against my natural buoyancy in the heavy brine to get my whole body underwater, kowtowed.

Then I rose, waded slowly back to the beach, and left. In the heat of the Taiwan summer, I was mostly dry by the time I got home. I took a quick shower to rinse off the salt, changed into work clothes, and had time for an extremely late lunch before my 4:00 class.

Later I remembered that 2 Nephi 31 associates baptism with the word strait.

Does what I did today really count as "baptism" in any meaningful sense? I don't know. I'm not even sure I know what that question means. I do think it was some kind of test, though, and that I passed it by demonstrating my willingness to take physical action in response to a spiritual prompting, at a moment's notice, even though it involved doing something kind of weird. I have a very strong sense that if I had hesitated or delayed at all, if I had failed to take action immediately, some sort of opportunity would have been permanently lost. As for what exactly that means, we'll just have to see what happens. Your move, angels, ministers of grace, and sync fairies. Your -- you know what word Greg Carlwood would add here -- move.

Vizzini, flies, and full fathom five

In past comments on this blog, Bill has associated me with the character Vizzini from The Princess Bride (starring, incidentally, Cary Elwes), with particular reference to the famous scene where he has to guess which of two drinks is poisoned, not knowing that in fact both are poisoned. Bill also connected The Princess Bride (novel by William Goldman) with Lord of the Flies (by William Golding). He suggested that I was the lord of the flies and tried to connect me to various giant insect characters, such as Gregor Samsa and a character called the Bug from the movie Men in Black. All of this was in the context of Bill’s understanding that I “am” in some sense the Tolkien character Pharazon.

(Comments are not searchable. The bug comments are on the post "Can you metamorphosize?" Vizzini is mentioned in the comments on "Don't be fooled by fake yellow flowers" and probably elsewhere, too.)

In “Shem and the dry Jack,” I referred to Pharazon as being “full fathom five,” meaning in a watery grave. I had forgotten that Tolkien actually has him buried in a cave rather than underwater like his countrymen. Since I’ve been advised to spell out all allusions to poetry, that’s a phrase from Ariel’s song in The Tempest.

Full fathom five thy father lies;

Of his bones are coral made;

Those are pearls that were his eyes;

Nothing of him that doth fade,

But doth suffer a sea change

Into something rich and strange.

Last night I read a scene in Last Call where the main character, Scott Crane, is scuba diving in Lake Mead, looking for a severed head. When he finds the head, which turns out to be that of the murdered mobster Benjamin “Bugsy” Siegel, he sees that some of the skull has changed to coral and that one of the eyes is now a pearl. Coral and pearls aren’t found in lakes, so this is clearly a deliberate allusion to Shakespeare. The phrase “sea change” is even used; I guess “lake change” didn’t have the same ring. (Bill recently asserted, in an unrelated context -- a comment on "The modified Book of the Lamb" -- that lake could refer to the sea.)

When Crane touches the pearl eye, he enters a mostly-hallucinatory vision in which, while his physical body is still scuba diving, he finds himself in Siegel’s casino and meets Siegel himself as he was when he was alive. Siegel shows him a gambling trick: You put two sugar cubes on a table and, before releasing a fly, place bets on which of the two it will land on first. You rig the game by treating one surface of each sugar cube with DDT. By turning one cube poison side up and the other poison side down, you can control the behavior of the fly, which will not land on the poisoned surface. But, as Siegel proceeds to demonstrate with a monstrous fly “the size of a plum,” as the fly eats the seemingly unpoisoned sugar, it eventually reaches the DDT and dies anyway. Like Vizzini, it is doomed because it does not realize that both options are poisoned.

A black sedan to take you to the nearest star

License plates are bargain-basement syncs, and at first I wasn’t going to bother posting this one. Last night, I stopped at a red light behind a black BMW sedan with the license plate AMU 6666.

Repeating digits always feel significant, but they aren’t really in this case. Series of sixes or eights are considered lucky by the Chinese. Vanity plates as such aren’t available in Taiwan, but you can pay more — sometimes a lot more, occasionally more than the value of the car itself — to get a lucky series of digits. People who do this are the same kinds of people who drive BMWs.

AMU appeared in the "Igxuhp zvmwqfb Jack dry stolen" post, and Bill identified it as Elvish. In "Ascending to the black star," I said that the AMU was leading to the black star in the center of a Scrabble board.

I saw the AMU license plate on a black sedan. In the Ides of March song "Vehicle," which has been back in the sync stream as Roy Jay’s theme song, the singer introduces himself as “a friendly stranger in a black sedan” and offers to “take you to the nearest star.”

In the black star post, I also note that Wm, an abbreviation for my name which I have used since childhood, appears, written backwards, intersecting AMU. The brand name BMW also contains a backwards Wm. Furthermore, XU and MW together form a square divided crosswise, blue in two opposite corners and white in the other two. This is the same color scheme, though in mirror image, as the BMW logo.

I wasn’t going to post the above, but this morning I got a reinforcing sync. I stopped at a red light again, and in front of me was a scooter with the plate "888 BWM." That’s another repdigit, and three eights are equal to four sixes. Yesterday’s sedan had prompted the thought that BMW contains a backwards Wm. Now here was BMW with the Wm written in the correct order. It seemed to be saying, "Hey, don't forget that other license plate you saw yesterday!"

Both 6 + 6 + 6 + 6 and 8 + 8 + 8 add up to 24. Does that number have some significance here? It's the total number of letters in my full name, but that's about all I've got so far.

Update: The number 24 turns out to be directly relevant to AMU. Bill wrote this in a comment on "Ascending to the black star":

Incidentally, I scored the word, even though I know diagonal words aren't allowed. With the triple and double letter scores, combined with the double word score, AMU gives us a solid 24. Not bad.

Observant flies and guys named Riff

Earlier today I posted “Riff Raff the Rapper’s intellectual property,” reporting what I called a “fly-on-the-wall dream” about a litigious artist called Riff Raff the Rapper. The expression refers to the idea that a fly on the wall would be able to observe everything without being noticed.

Tonight I read some more in Last Call. First I read this implied reference to the observational abilities of flies:

The flies were buzzing loudly—there must have been a hundred of them whirling around in the space over the table now—and Crane wondered if Mavranos meant to eat them and thus learn what they knew. Flies probably knew a lot.

Then I found this reference to a person named Riff:

Crane opened the door. “‘Maybe what you’re waitin’ for’ll be twitchin’ at the dance tonight!’” he said, quoting something Riff had said to Tony in West Side Story.

Mavranos smiled sourly as he slapped his jacket pocket for his keys. “You remember it killed Riff and Tony.”

I’ve never seen West Side Story and didn’t know it had a character called Riff. A quick word search confirms that this is the first and only mention of Riff in the novel. How many people are called Riff?

Either a sync or a bit of dream precognition. It’s hard to tell the difference anymore.

Covers of “1979”

I woke up from a catnap on the couch with my phone in my hand, open to the YouTube Music app, “1979 (Smashing Pumpkins cover)” — not playing, but all ready for me to tap the play button. I thought, “What’s that? I don’t want that!” and closed the app. I went back to sleep and had the dream I posted about in “Riff Raff the Rapper’s intellectual property.”

Some of my wording in that post was ambiguous and was misunderstood by Bill, so I had to clarify in the comments. It had to do with the two different ways of pronouncing the name Ralph, which I described as rhyming respectively with safe and — because I couldn’t think of any other rhyme — with Alph the sacred river from the Coleridge poem Kubla Khan.

Later in the day, that made me think of an old blog called Ralph the Sacred River which I used to check occasionally ages ago. I looked it up and found the latest post, “Ralphies 2024.” It has this to say about the best music of that year:

I got into listening to acoustic versions of rock hits; among them I give high marks to "1979" by Freedom Fry (Smashing Pumpkins cover) and "Wonderwall" by Ryan Adams (Oasis cover).

Is that the same “1979” cover that was somehow open on my phone when I woke up? I don’t know. I didn’t notice the artist’s name, and I can’t find it in my history because I didn’t actually play it. Still a sync either way.

I don’t know that song, and when I looked up the lyrics nothing struck me as noteworthy. Pumpkins are a sync theme, though, as are covers. Bill, Leo, and I were all born in 1979.

Riff Raff the Rapper’s intellectual property

Last night I had a fly-on-the-wall dream, in which I watched the goings-on but was not myself one of the characters,

A lawyer, who looked a bit like Bert Lahr (the Cowardly Lion), was sitting in his office, where his secretary, a young woman, was trying to convince him to take on the case of a recording artist whose stage name was Riff Raff the Rapper.

Riff Raff the Rapper wanted to sue the actor Ralph Fiennes for pronouncing his first name too much like Raff. The lawyer said there was no chance of winning such a suit, as the similarity between the two names was so slight.

The secretary then informed the lawyer that Riff Raff the Rapper also wanted to sue the State of California for appropriating the name of one of his albums, Sierra Nevada, and using it for a mountain range.

“This nudnick’s meshuggeneh!” the lawyer said. “Does he have any idea how old the Sierra Nevada is? The State of California should be suing him!”

Upon waking, I did a web search and discovered that there really is a rapper called Riff Raff, though he doesn’t use “the Rapper” as part of his stage name. He’s even Jewish, which fits with the lawyer’s use of Yiddish to describe him.

In terms of sync, I think the dream is related to “Caroline, times never had the effect you’d expect.” That post highlights the line “I’ll be Ozzie Smith, you be Sierra my wife” and notes that Ozzie Smith is also the name of an important character in Last Call, a novel set primarily in California and Nevada. That post also mentions the movie Hurt Locker, which has Ralph Fiennes in it. The rapper’s stage name may also be a link to “Hey, Mary, show me that riff.”

"Weirdos could be here," he thought.

I checked the Duckstack today and read the latest, "Comb Tomb." One bit is about crime:

Most nonviolent crime is a crime of opportunity. Anything happening in the ghetto is just some teenage hooligan jiggling car doors as he passes to see if any are unlocked. Then they ransack the car as fast as they can and leave with anything that looks like it might be sellable on ebay. There’s no thought behind it, they’re impulsive and unscrupulous, that’s all.

After the word hooligan, you can click for a footnote, which reads, "'Teenage Hooligans' could be here, he thought." I immediately understood what that meant -- it's what stick-in-the-muds would call a "racist dog whistle" -- but didn't recognize it as something I'd seen in exactly that form before.

Then I checked /x/, where I found that the latest Roy Jay thread is titled "/royjay/ weirdos could be here he thought edition."

Just as a reminder, although Roy Jay is a very au courant theme on /x/ right now -- the first Roy Jay /x/ post was the past April 5 -- I discovered him not by looking at new threads but by searching the entire archive, going back to 2013, for the string "blue prince" and getting only one result, which was a Roy Jay thread.

Running into the "X could be here, he thought" format twice in quick succession like that, I of course looked it up. Know Your Meme has it as "Dapper Man Pumping Gas While Smoking Cigarette / X Could Be Here, I Hate X," and as expected it originated as a racist copypasta on 4chan. It was prompted by the challenge to write a short story about this image:

It appears that in this image's entire history as a meme, everyone has studiously ignored the fact that this gas station offers E85, regular, and milk. What kind of car runs on milk?