The currently active synchronicity-stream began when I happened to think of "The Windows of Heaven," a Mormon movie in which Lorenzo Snow tells the people of St. George, Utah, that they must pay tithing to end a drought. Three days earlier, I had posted about the Bloodhound Gang song "The Bad Touch," which begins with these lines:
Sweat, baby, sweat, baby Sex is a Texas drought
A few days later, I watched a video about the Gadianton Canyon Incident, which repeatedly referred to the city of St. George and also seemed to reference the Bloodhound Gang song "Uhn Tiss Uhn Tiss Uhn Tiss."
The web of syncs expanded to include various other things, including crocodiles and several movies released in 2011. Serhei commented, "The crocodile bits jumped out at me as the prior day I'd just read Shelley's 'Mask of Anarchy,'" and quoted the lines where "Hypocrisy / On a crocodile rode by." I noted that the "Mask of Anarchy" also says of Murder "Seven blood-hounds followed him" -- linking back to the Bloodhound Gang.
Yesterday I checked the Anonymous Conservative blog, as I do most days. One of the items was "Texas farmers say 2021 drought already rivals 2011 drought." Clicking the link I found that the drought was not confined to Texas; the map showed that St. George, Utah, was also in the area marked "D4 Exceptional Drought." So that's the Bloodhound Gang's "Texas drought," the St. George drought of "The Windows of Heaven," and the year 2011, all in one headline!
The other night I suddenly had a very specific urge to search YouTube for videos about the Gadianton Canyon Incident, an urban legend from southern Utah. The basic story is that four young women took a wrong turn en route to Cedar City and ended up in some sort of parallel dimension. They found a roadside diner with neon signs in an unknown language, met tall beings that did not seem to be human, and were chased by three-wheeled egg-shaped vehicles, before abruptly finding themselves back in the normal world -- in the middle of the desert a few miles north of the highway they had been on, with no tire tracks to show how they had gotten there.
Southern Utah is my old missionary stomping grounds, so I had heard the yarn many times. Although the story always identifies the four girls as students at Southern Utah University in Cedar City, the only "Gadianton Canyon" I ever found (so called because it was supposed to be haunted by the ghosts of members of that ancient Nephite secret society) was quite far away, in Sanpete County, near Snow College. (Yes, Snow College is named after Lorenzo Snow.)
So I already knew the story and believed it to be completely made-up. And I have a strong aversion to talking video in general. Nevertheless, I suddenly had this urge, so I watched not one but two talking videos about the Gadianton Canyon Incident!
I do not recommend either of these videos -- the first is overly dramatic and goofy, and the second is positively packed with words you can't say on television -- but syncs must be documented.
This first video was noteworthy chiefly for the implication -- not part of any version of the story I had ever heard -- that the beings the girls encountered were "reptilian aliens" and that the parallel world into which they had wandered was one in which the dinosaurs had never gone extinct but had evolved into humanoid form.
This got my attention because I had recently illustrated a post about the Bloodhound Gang song "The Bad Touch" with a picture of a reptilian alien. Evil reptilians also seemed to tie in with the George-and-dragon theme.
This second video was sync city. First of all, there were constant references to the city of St. George, Utah -- even though the incident supposedly took place on Highway 56 near Modena, quite far from St. George. Second, near the beginning of the video, one of the hosts comments on the intro music and says "Nts! Nts! Nts!" in exactly the same way as the woman in the Bloodhound Gang song "Uhn Tiss Uhn Tiss Uhn Tiss," so there's the Bloodhoung Gang again. Finally, they end by concluding that the four women probably just hallucinated the whole thing under the influence of shrooms or LSD.
Why are hallucinogens relevant? Well, my original St. George post ended thus: "Also, probably apropos of nothing, a chain of links originating with the "St. George" email led me to this cover of Pink Floyd's 'The Gnome,' which I rather like."
What was this chain? The reader who told me about how he had suddenly wanted to pray to St. George (and also discussed some recent dreams with a "demonic" theme) followed up that email with this:
I also stumbled upon tales of “DMT Entities” - apparently users of psychedelics report frequent encounters with different “trans dimensional entities” that sound, in many cases, like demons. So I guess demons is the theme.
and then this:
I forgot the important part, which seems connected to the Saint George prayer:
The serpent entity seems to be one of the most prevalent in ayahuasca experiences than in experiences with DMT alone.
I clicked the "DMT Entities" link, which included this quote from Terence McKenna.
There are many of these things, but the main thing that's happening is that they are engaged in a linguistic activity of some sort, which we do not have words for, but it's visible language. They are doing the visible language trip. When you break into the space, they actually cheer! The first thing you hear when you pass across is this 'hhhyeaaaaaayyy' - you know the Pink Floyd song? "The Gnomes have Learned a New Way to Say Hoo-Ray?” This has gotta be what these guys were talking about; how else could it be? It doesn't make any sense otherwise.
I didn't know that song, so I searched for the name. Eventually I found the song he meant, which is actually just called "The Gnome," but what the search turned up first was this Shpongle track inspired by McKenna's comments on the Pink Floyd song.
Oh, and there's this.
Notice Tintin's "visible language" in the top right panel (just after he says "What an extraordinary coincidence!"), and the "hooray!" just below it. He has discovered in a scrap of newspaper the eclipse information that will later save them from being sacrificed to the Sun. Also notice the juxtaposition with a pipe.
Would it surprise you to know that one of the proximate inspirations for my previous post, "Satan divided against himself," was the Bloodhound Gang song "The Bad Touch"?
My wife, bless her heart, is something of a Maroon Five fan. (Like I can talk, right?) The other day she was listening to "Animals," which begins thus and continues in more or less the same vein.
Baby I'm preying on you tonight
Hunt you down eat you alive
Just like animals, animals
Like animals-mals
And I thought, "You know, this is like what 'The Bad Touch' would be in an alternate universe where Jimmy Pop was -- as Bugs Bunny might have put it -- a maroon." The same basic idea, minus the wit.
So I got up YouTube and listened to "The Bad Touch." Then I listened to it again, and again, and -- oh, probably about a dozen times in two or three days. And I thought, "What am I doing? What on earth is making me want to keep listening to this vulgar, sophomoric dreck?" And then I realized that what was driving me was an overwhelming feeling of nostalgia for a more wholesome time.
Let me repeat that: This crass-to-the-max four-minute dirty joke about doing it like they do on the Discovery Channel filled me with nostalgia for a more wholesome time. How I wish I could go back and report this observation to the people of 1999! What could they possibly make of it? "The Bad Touch" must surely have seemed at the time like the nadir of music's descent into garbage.
I say "must surely" because I wasn't there, not really. I was a homeschooled Mormon kid who grew up in the country, and when we occasionally dusted off the TV it was only to watch PBS. In 1999, when "The Bad Touch" was released, I was a missionary in Utah and didn't know anything about it. So my nostalgia's not for this song specifically, as if I used to listen to it all the time in junior high or something. Pop culture nostalgia's not really a thing for me. I never even watched the Discovery Channel! It's just a feeling that the culture that produced it was a much more wholesome culture than the one in which we now live.
Trying to understand that feeling, I zeroed in on the line "You and me, baby, ain't nothin' but mammals." The message of the song, while evil, is at least organic -- the natural man, return to monke. It is like a modern song in that it makes no pretense of being about "love" (except "the kind you clean up with a mop and bucket"), but conspicuous by its absence is any hint of the robot/alien/androgyne aesthetic, any overt reference to Satanism or blood sacrifice, any winking allusions to secret societies or MK-ULTRA mind control. It's just some dudes being jackasses -- being mammals -- and having fun. When was the last time mainstream evil was fun?
"You and me," baby? Speak for yourself!
(Incidentally, remember when every pop song was about love? Didn't it seem like that was something that would always be true? Even Aldous Huxley didn't imagine a dystopia without that.)
Scrolling through the comments on YouTube for "The Bad Touch," I find that a lot of them are saying how a song like this could never be released today, that people would find it far too offensive. Someone even said the lyrics "would make Cardi B blush" -- you know, Cardi B, who sings "Wet-Ass Pussy." Keep in mind that "The Bad Touch" is much less explicitly obscene than contemporary music, and that the only word they had to bleep out in the "clean" version was "doggy." But it's still true: people would be offended if it were released today. Doing it like they do on the Discovery Channel has too much of nature in it, too much of creation. Evil has moved on. Ahriman is the flavor du jour.
Of course, it's even more obvious that "The Bad Touch" could never have been released in, say, the 1950s. It represents a particular stage in the development of evil, in the gradual unfolding of les fleurs de mal. It came, it went, and it's gone. There will be no return to monke. Sorath is the future.
"Me and you do the kind of stuff that only Prince would sing about" -- in retrospect "Party Like It's 1999" has taken on a whole new meaning.
