Rumi, Wanderjahre, Area 51, 666 phone numbers

I teach English to a husband and wife who run a manufacturing company, separately because their level is quite different. Each of them subscribes to a magazine for students of English, and one of the things we do in our tutoring sessions is reviewing what they've read in these magazines.

Yesterday, I taught the husband. The article he had read was about a K-pop entity called Ejae, who wrote a song called "Golden" for the movie KPop Demon Hunters. In the movie, the song is performed by an animated character called Rumi, who is voiced by Ejae. The only Rumi I knew before reading that article was the Sufi poet ("He's so unhip that when you say Dylan, he think's you're talkin' about Dylan Thomas, whoever he was"). The name "Golden" was somewhat interesting, as it is the meaning of the name Pharazon, but not interesting enough to willingly subject myself to a K-pop song.

When I came home last night, I went into my study and saw that one of the books in my bookcase was ready to fall off the shelf. This bookcase is more of a cabinet, with glass doors, and the book was leaning against the glass so that if you opened it, it would fall out. I opened the cabinet, catching the book before it fell, and replaced it on the shelf in a less precarious position. It was a translated volume of the poetry of Rumi.

Rumi has appeared on this blog before. In "WaGon" (July 2025), seeing WanderingGondola's handle had made me think of the word wagon, prompting me to search for wagon poem, and what came up was a Rumi poem with the translated title "A Great Wagon."

That word put the Old Crow Medicine Show song "Wagon Wheel" in my head, and I remembered that I had posted about that before, too. I found the post, "Safka's Dylan" (December 2019) -- which is a funny title, given that I just mentioned Dylan independently in connection with Rumi. In that post I write:

The first crack in my zero tolerance for Dylan covers appeared in 2004 when I discovered a reworking of the Dylan fragment "Wagon Wheel" by the old-timey LARP group Old Crow Medicine Show -- which happened to be playing on the radio as I was packing my suitcases at the start of my Wanderjahre, and which became a sort of private theme song for a good long time.

That's the only time I'd ever used Wanderjahre on this blog. It's interesting because it was WanderingGondola's name that first led me to post about Rumi, but even more so because I am currently reading Child of Fortune by Norman Spinrad (whose surname means "spinning wheel"). In the novel, it is customary for all young people to go through what is called a wanderjahr period (without the final e for some reason), during which they are known as children of fortune (which is the meaning of my own surname). In my first post about that novel, "Voyage d'ark" (May 12), Wade McKenzie left comments connecting that word wanderjahr with the works of Goethe -- Römische Elegien, and of course Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre. You may have noticed that four volumes of Goethe are visible in the Rumi photo above.

When I came home on my lunch break today, I found that a package had been delivered to my house -- a furniture component I had ordered from China. The shipping label caught my eye:

Right above that big number 51, it says 通關專區, "customs clearance area." I think the customs clearance area is actually TPCT (Taipei Port Container Terminal), but it certainly looks as if it's Customs Clearance Area 51. Area 51 came up just yesterday; see "May 20 anniversaries: Section 51 and Levi Strauss blue jeans."

When I turned the package over, I found another label, with a weight corresponding to my birthday:

It says 3.15 Kg, corresponding to 3/15, the Ides of March. Directly below the 3 is the number 19. In "The randomness is working well today" (June 2025), I wrote about "a March 19 post wishing a happy birthday to anyone whose birthday is March 15." The 19 on the label is actually part of the date 05/19, which is my brother's birthday.

The Area 51 coincidence, got me thinking about that number again -- the atomic number of antimony, artificially introduced into the sync stream in "The Ant Money experiment: Immediate results." Regarding the Ant Money experiment itself, I had decided that if it resulted in any actual money showing up, I wouldn't take it, because it would be "fairy gold" and thus untrustworthy. Thinking about the number 51 today, I realized that its prime factors, 3·17, correspond to the date of St. Patrick's Day -- closely associated with leprechauns and thus with "fairy gold."

Minutes after thinking of that, I was on the road and passed this phone number painted on the side of a building:

The number includes 317 -- St. Patrick's Day, and the prime factors of Ant Money -- immediately followed by 666. In the comments on the Area 51 post, Debbie interpreted 51 as being another form of 15 and went on to write about the number 666. In "Girls with pearls, six-legged spider, Star of Chaos" (May 18), I took a Tarot card numbered 15 and modified it so that it also encoded the number 666.

The number 666 turning up in a phone number is also a sync. Yesterday I listened to Tucker Carlson's interview with Sean Stone, who describes getting calls from such numbers when he became involved in Freemasonry:

In between . . . the first degree and the third degree . . . in that time period, I would get phone calls from 666 numbers all the time. 6666, "We want your soul." Just like demonic voices, "We want your soul." That kind of nonsense.

He even mentions 6666 -- with four sixes -- just like the number photographed above.

Today I taught the wife in the couple mentioned at the beginning of this post. The article she had read in her magazine was about wilderness areas in the United States, and about the Wilderness Act of 1964 that established them. Area 51 first entered the sync stream via Section 51 of the D&C, received in Thompson, Ohio -- which was my mailing address when I lived in what is now Hell Hollow Wilderness Area.