I know I pioneered some things, no doubt. I'm not really sure how I feel about it.

I woke up this morning with no memory of any dreams but with the lines that form this post's title in my head.

It's a quote from Buck Owens. Back in the 1990s there was a brief article about him in the local paper (either the Lake County News-Herald or the Cleveland Plain Dealer; my parents subscribed to both). It had a photo of him with the quote printed in bold beneath it. Here's a reconstruction:

I don't know much about Buck Owens, but I know what I like, and I decided that this -- the highlighting of the content-free quote, the look on his face, the way the guy was dressed -- was just about the best thing the News-Herald (or possibly Plain Dealer) had ever published. Well, except for that even more quotable one about the guy who ate 25 eggs every day "for complex psychological reasons."

"I know [insert vague statement], no doubt. I'm not really sure how I feel about it" became a catchphrase in my family and circle of friends, and a very versatile one. I pioneered that. I'm not really sure how I feel about it.

That was a long time ago. Why was it in my head when I woke up this morning? I know there must have been some reason, no doubt. . . . Anyway, I tried my best to track down the original article on the Internet but, unsurprisingly, failed. I did find the photo, though -- from the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum, into which he was inducted in 1996, so I suppose that was the occasion for the article.

Later in the morning, I checked some blogs and found a new post by William Wright: "Sync-fairies and writing again," in which he describes how his syncs have been interfacing with mine (including, most strikingly, a persistent delusion that he himself is literally a drowning boy in an Itladian-type scenario). He introduces these reflections with this:

In that Sync-fest post, the Jaredite-UFO-saucer points he was making weren't the only thing that caught my attention.  He devotes significant space to this concept of a 'Drowning Boy'.  This stood out to me for reasons I will explain below, before transitioning into some open thoughts on these syncs and how I feel about them (preview:  I am not sure how I feel).

Precognition? Telepathy? Synchronicity? Just a very common turn of phrase which may not actually have been pioneered by Buck Owens? I know it must be one of those things, no doubt. . . .

William Wright mentions at one point becoming rather distressed by the invasion of the sync fairies into his life, and that playing a role in his decision to stop blogging. I know of at least two other cases in which readers of this blog have ended up with psychological issues with a little help from my friends. Is it irresponsible of me to share all this stuff so openly? I was bred en bawn in a brier-patch, but for those less accustomed to high strangeness it can be rather shattering.

One of Buck Owens's hit songs, I learned today, was called "Ruby (Are You Mad)." That, combined with the idea of hard-to-articulate feelings, made me think of this famous question posed by the late Charles Manson. Whatever you think of him -- murderer, patsy, spook, or something else -- he was undeniably a gifted orator.

Well? Do you?

We don't care what momma don't 'low, gonna pick that banjo anyhow

Slow Joe is still being compared to a banjo player, one who is being secretly controlled by a hidden mechanism.

Asked an unchallenging question about 12-year-olds and vaccination, he drifted off in the middle of a sentence, and, as he so often does, looked down, got that Deliverance banjo player look on his face, and appeared to be listening to something in his earpiece, and then strung together a sequence of words that were not grammatically related to the rest of the sentence, but which, on their own, were coherent.  As if repeating what he just heard.

This might be a good time to review my October 2020 post "Slow Joe Crow on the banjo," featuring His Joeness as a machine-operated banjo-pickin' corvid plague doctor under the control of a magician called either Steve ("crown," stephanos being the Greek equivalent of the Latin corona) or Maladie ("sickness").

Slow Joe Crow of course comes from Fox in Socks, which the sync fairies recently brought back to my attention.

Oh, and here's a completely unrelated video clip.

License plate syncs

I have recently posted on the number 666, and on a dream about Charles Manson and Timothy Leary. This latter connection was reinforced this morning when I followed a link on Anonymous Conservative to a 2019 Telegraph article called "Making a murderer: did the CIA's secret LSD labs turn Charles Manson into a killer?" Leary is not mentioned in the article, but of course his name is synonymous with LSD.

Less than an hour after skimming the Manson article, I was stopped at a traffic light and suddenly became aware of the license plates of the three motorcycles stopped in front of me: NB6-616, MRK-75?? (I forget the last two digits, maybe 74?), and LDS-286. These entered my consciousness simultaneously and were all immediately perceived as meaningful.

I read the first one as "Nota bene: 66(1)6" -- that is, note well the number of the beast. (Some manuscripts of Revelation have 616 instead of 666.) Later I realized that NB itself could also stand for "number of the beast."

In that context, MRK obviously suggested the word mark, as in "mark of the beast." It also made me think of marek, which I (erroneously?) believed to be the Arabic word for "apostate." Back in 2002, when I had recently left the CJCLDS and sometimes lurked on exmormon.org, one of the regular posters there used the handle Al-Marek and explained that it meant "the apostate" in Arabic. Apparently, though, he just made that up; checking various online dictionaries and translators, I can find no such Arabic word.

Since MRK had made me think of my 2002 apostasy from Mormonism, the last license plate really jumped out at me. LDS of course means Latter-day Saint, i.e. Mormon, and 286 is the Simple English Gematria (S:E:G:) value of my full name. That is, if A=1 and Z=26, the sum of all the letters in William James Tychonievich is 286. (The number of the beast is also traditionally interpreted in terms of gematria, 666 and 616 being the values of two different transliterations of Nero Caesar.)

The combined message of the license plates was, then, "Mark well the number of the beast, apostate Mormon William James Tychonievich!"

Only I'd remembered the gematria wrong. As soon as I was off the road and could use a calculator, I added it up and found that the number of my name is actually 268, not 286. To make the license plate match my name, I would have to transpose the last two digits. And what about the other part of the license plate, LDS? If we perform the same transposition on it, we get, yes, LSD. (And if we transpose the last two phonemes of Latter-day Saint, we get Latter-day Satan, i.e. the antichrist or "beast." The S:E:G: value of LDS or LSD is 35; three and a half, or 3.5, a prominent number in the Book of Daniel, is borrowed by Revelation and associated with the antichrist.)

The LDS/LSD connection is made in the 1986 film Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home. Kirk and Spock have time-traveled back to the 1980s, and Kirk tries to explain Spock's odd appearance and behavior by saying he "did a little too much LDS" in the sixties. I referenced this line recently in my April 29 post "Gadianton Canyon syncs," when a YouTuber dismissed a bit of Mormon-adjacent folklore (the Gadianton Canyon Incident) as most likely the result of "shrooms or LSD."

I have no particular interpretation of all this so far. We'll see where the sync fairies decide to go with it.

Timothy and Charlie

I often dream of book titles, but this time I dreamed I was actually reading a book. It was some sort of history of the sixties, and I was reading about how Timothy Leary once tried to recruit Charles Manson to help him spread the gospel of LSD. Nothing had come of it, but later, when Manson had become notorious for his supposed role in the supposed murders, this recruitment attempt became a sort of scandal and permanently damaged whatever was left of Leary's reputation.

⁂

After waking up, I naturally did a web search for charles manson timothy leary to see if my dream had had any basis in fact. It turns out that the two did meet briefly in 1971 or 1974 (accounts vary), when Leary's cell was next door to Manson's in Folsom Prison. Of course this was after Tate-LaBianca. There's even a play based on this meeting, with the Snakes on a Plane-esque title Charles Manson and Timothy Leary in Folsom Prison, which was written by Peter McLaren and performed in Toronto in 2009.