The Doors

This is another of those sprawling tons-of-syncs posts, more suited to the Conspiracy Wall format than to linear writing, so apologies in advance for its disorganized structure.

Today -- or rather January 15, probably no longer "today" by the time this post is finished -- I happened to go into a little-used room in my school, not usable as a classroom for arcane legal reasons. There's a low bookcase there, and one of my employees had left on top of it a stack of old EFL magazines. The one at the top of the stack, and thus the only one whose cover was visible, was this one from April 2017. The magazines have been there for a while, and I see them every time I go into the room, but not until today did the I really notice the cover illustration:

Isn't that a green door on the right? Well, it's that ambiguous teal-ish color that can be green, blue, or gray depending on who you ask, but it's at least Green Door-adjacent. The cover story is called 《兩扇門》, "Two Doors," which differs by just one character from the restaurant name 六扇門, "Six Doors," which is inexplicably called Six Owl Door in English. Also on the green(ish) door is a boy with what looks like an (owl-adjacent) peregrine falcon, so I suppose 《山居歲月》, "The Mountain-dwelling Years," must be the Chinese title of the children's book My Side of the Mountain. Checking that now on Google, I find that it's even more owl-adjacent than I had supposed!

I had thought Jean Craighead George was a one-hit wonder, but apparently she's also the author of There's an Owl in the Shower. By the way, the peregrine falcon from My Side of the Mountain also syncs with the "mini T. rex" theme. Like all birds, of course, the falcon is technically a coelurosaur, though much smaller than its fellow coelurosaur T. rex. More to the point, though, peregrine suggests Steve Peregrin Took, who took his stage name from one of Tolkien's hobbits ("mini" people) and was a member of the band Tyrannosaurus Rex. The peregrine’s title as fastest animal in the world also links it to the mini T. rex as a racing animal. On a more personal level, as a child (still in school, so no older than ten) I once wrote a story called "Escape from Education" that was very heavily influenced by My Side of the Mountain. It was about a boy who escaped from school, stumbled upon a time machine, and ended up stranded in the Mesozoic, where he tamed not a falcon named Frightful but a rhamphorhynchid pterosaur named Featherless. As is inevitable in such stories, the main character eventually has to face down a T. rex -- in this case, a "jet black" one, which I suppose links by way of a pun to "Tyrannosaurs in F-14s."

Anyway, returning to the magazine with the possibly-green door on the cover, I opened it up to page 8 to see what the cover story was about. Here's how it begins:

The Doors is a unique book. The cover looks like a pair of doors: one red, one green. . . . Behind each door is a picture of a house and the man who lives there. One, Nick, lives in the modern age, while the other, Charlie, is a Victorian gentleman. We get a glimpse of each man's daily life. When the men return home from a walk and enter their homes, however, they somehow switch places. Both men are scared to be in a different time. . . .

So yes, the door is green, and the story is about time travel and is called The Doors, like the rock band. The Green Door first entered my sync-stream through an email from (someone who was then) a stranger, and the email was triggered by a post of mine titled “Break on through to the other side,” like the Doors song. Readers at that time drew my attention to two different short stories called "The Green Door," a 1906 story by O. Henry and a 1910 story by Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, both of which I proceeded to read. In the latter story, a girl finds herself transported into the past when she goes through a green door. While in the past, she meets a boy who is a fellow modern. He asks, "Did you get here, I wonder, in some queer way just as I did?" and she tells him about the green door.

"It is just the same with me," whispered the boy.

Letitia shivered, half with joy, half with horror. "Did you come through a little green door?"

"No, I came through a book."

Letitia jumped. "A book!" she repeated feebly.

This obviously ties in quite closely with The Doors as described in the magazine -- a book designed to look like a pair of doors, and in which a green door serves as a portal to a different time.

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After noticing this magazine and reading the article about The Doors, I went downstairs. As is customary in Taiwan, there is a "shoe room" at the foot of the stairs, where you can change out of your street shoes and into your slippers before going upstairs. It's full of shelves for putting footwear on, but today there were two pairs of slippers that had been left out in the middle of the floor instead of being stowed properly. One of them looked like this:

Surprise! It's a mini T. rex eating watermelon! In my August 2022 post "The Wizard at the green door," the green door took the form of a "watermelon."

Just now, while I was writing this post, the mini T. rex theme made me think of “If You Were a Dinosaur, My Love,” the 2013 short story that was the outrage du jour for a while among such right-wing blogging sci-fi authors as Vox Day and John C. Wright because it had won a major sci-fi award despite having nothing at all to do with sci-fi. The whole story consists of the narrator imagining how things would have played out differently if her fiancé, a "hate crime" victim, had been "a T-Rex . . . a small one, only five feet, ten inches," who could have hunted down and murdered his assailants instead of letting them beat him into a coma for being "a fag, a towel-head, a shemale, a sissy, a spic, every epithet they could think of." (This is speculative fiction, see, because people aren't actually dinosaurs, but what if they were?) I looked up the author, a Jewish woman called Rachel Swirsky, and her most recent work -- first search suggestion when I put her name into Google -- is a novella about Universal Basic Income called January Fifteenth. I discovered that today, January 15. Recall that yesterday, January 14, I happened to read a reference in the Bible to "the fourteenth day of the first month" (the date of Passover, when the Hebrews painted their doorways red); today, reading the next three chapters of Numbers, I read "they departed from Rameses in the first month, on the fifteenth day of the first month" (Num. 3:33). And on June 14, 2002 -- the very day that Swirsky's January Fifteenth was published -- I happened to look up Roosh Valizadeh's birthday and wrote a post noting that "He was born on June 14, 1979 -- so it was on his birthday that I had this sudden urge to look up his date of birth."

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The next thing that happened was that I felt a sudden need to go to Burger King. This was highly uncharacteristic, as I almost never eat at fast-food chains, and this was around 9:30 at night, which is not a normal time for me to be eating anything at all. It wasn't really a craving for Whoppers or anything, just a dispassionate sense that I really needed to go to that particular place right away.

The only nearby Burger King is in a part of the city I don't go to very often. On the way, I passed a relatively new Italian restaurant. The sign had a green rectangle and a red rectangle (from the Italian flag, rotated 90 degrees, and with the white part subsumed by the white background), so I stopped and snapped a photo because of its similarity to the red and green doors.

How do I know it's a relatively new restaurant? Because months ago I snapped a photo of the same place because its sign was a big green number 17 decorated with fleurs-de-lys. I've since deleted that photo, so I tried to find a picture of the old sign online. That's when I found out that before it was green, it was red!

from a 2015 blog post

Google Street View still shows this

Once I arrived at Burger King, I found painted on an interior wall the same thing: a long green rectangle above a red one, with white space between.

Weird, right? If that's supposed to be a stylized image of a hamburger, shouldn't there be another bun on top instead of something green?

At Burger King, I noticed the 7 Up dispenser, since that's a pretty uncommon beverage in Taiwan. The 7 Up logo is red and green, as is the 7-Eleven logo. 7-Eleven's Taiwan branding connects it with the theme of doors: their slogan is "Always Open 7-Eleven," and they have two mascots called Open-chan and Lock-chan.

And of course 7-Eleven stores incorporate the motif of a green rectangle above a red one, with white in between.

Back in July, ben left a comment with a link to a photo of three doors, two of which had the numbers 7 and 11 on them.

I noticed that 7 times 11 is 77, while 7 Up has an S:E:G: value of 44. (S:E:G: is Simple English Gematria. Each letter has its ordinal value, so that A = 1 and Z = 26.) One of the many coincidences one can find in S:E:G: is that the four basic components of material reality all add up to combinations of 4 and 7.

• space = 44
• time = 47
• energy = 74
• matter = 77

This is interesting because in both The Green Door and The Doors, the door is a portal to a different time (time = 7 Up = 44). One of the things I discovered while searching for possible meanings of the red door was a game called "Red Door, Yellow Door," also known as "Seven Doors." It's really more of a guided meditation exercise than a game, in which you go into a trance and visualize opening doors of various colors and entering rooms. If you see stairs going up, you should take them, but never take stairs going down. If you find a room full of clocks, you should leave at once. So that links to seven, up, time, and of course the idea of different colored doors. You're also supposed to leave if you see "an old woman, possibly in Victorian dress," which is a link to the "Victorian gentleman" in The Doors.

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Later, at home, I was sitting in the living room with my wife, who was watching television. I started thinking about the Doors and wondered whether any of their album covers had ever had actual doors on them, maybe even a red one and a green one. I started scrolling through pictures of Doors albums on my phone. This one caught my eye.

What got my attention was the lemniscate representing the letters OO in the band name. In my post "Roast Beast for lunch, Roast Beast for dinner," I noted the coincidence of having eaten at two different restaurants in one day that had the street address 666. The first 666 restaurant, where I had lunch, was this one:

I remember thinking at first that it was supposed to be Cafe Dood, as in "im in ur base, killin ur d00dz," but the place is actually called Cafe D&D; the lemniscate is supposed to be a stylized ampersand. Since the letter D comes from the Phoenician letter daleth, meaning "door," D&D means "door and door," two doors.

I screenshotted the Doors album cover for future reference and then happened to glance up at the TV — and quickly snapped a photo just before this disappeared from the screen:

I'm not exaggerating how immediate this was. The screenshot and the photo are timestamped 10:47 and 10:48.

On the Doors album, the lemniscate represents OO; in the D&D logo, it represents AND. In the Bloodline Detectives logo, it simultaneously represents OO and the idea of DNA, which is just AND spelled backwards. Notice also the group of three hexagons, corresponding to 666. (If you look back at the magazine cover at the beginning of this post, you'll see that the Doors story is on page 8, and that the magazine is No. 216, which is 6 × 6 × 6.) Also, all three have at least one letter D next to the lemniscate.

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Shortly after this, I went outside to take out the trash and found that one of my neighbors had dumped this:

Owls reading books, and an owl coming through a door; both The Doors and "The Green Door" equate the book with a door.

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Update: The next day, January 16, I went back into the room where I had found the magazine. I noticed for the first time that the logo on the remote for the ceiling fan (different from the fans in every other room of the school) is a lemniscate in the shape of two letter Ds.

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Update 2: All these lemniscates led me to the Wikipedia article for "Infinity symbol," where I read this:

Perhaps in some cases because of typographic limitations, other symbols resembling the infinity sign have been used for the same meaning. Leonhard Euler used an open letterform more closely resembling a reflected and sideways S than a lemniscate.

Since the Cafe D&D also looks a bit like a sideways S, I followed the footnote to p. 174 of Euler's "Variae observationes circa series infinitas."

Incidentally, the name Euler is pretty close to the German word for "owl," Eule.