It’s strange I wrote so little about Dominique in 2013. She was a major influence and I wonder why I didn’t. Am I more clear-headed now? More retrospective?
My visions began around the time I found Dominique on LiveJournal (2000). My first vision was how to crash Saleslogix (my employer at the time) and details are in my 2006 DEFCON presentation, available online if you care. I’ve had nine or ten visions and thought my mind was processing information in a different way until 2009.
In Sept of 2009, I had daily visions of the Lakewood, WA police shooting which occurred in November. The visions were vivid and in the first person. I saw myself enter a coffee shop (Starbucks, not the minor chain of the real event) and shoot four male policeman in the head. Rarely it was five men but never a woman like the real event. Sometimes I had a Glock, sometimes a revolver and the real shooter had both. This vision lasted until shortly before the real event and repeated over one hundred times. All my other visions were a one-time occurrence.
I searched for a rational explanation after the shooting. Perhaps we’d both read of a similar event but I couldn’t find one. To my knowledge, the Lakewood shootings are unique in US history. Perhaps we’d watched the same movie or been subjected to a subliminal internet broadcast but Clemmons (the shooter) was jailed in May and I don’t own a television.
I put it aside until last year when I looked up his history and was surprised. He, too, started having apocalyptic visions just before his arrest. Something happened to him, he’d had a stable life for five years after a lifetime of small-time crime and no history of visions or mental illness.
Last year I wrote a semantic analysis model which uses thirteen ratios of word type/count to determine the state and direction of personal relationships. It suddenly sprang into my mind during Thanksgiving as I drove to Kansas City. I scribbled it down when I reached my motel and later wrote a more formal document. For weeks I wasn’t sure but now I think that it, too, was a vision.
Most of my visions were work-oriented and more of a guide than a prophecy, laying out a path of action which I could take if I wanted to. I’ve only had one personal vision, of a waitress with deep personal problems. She changed in front of me, aging fifteen or twenty years, turning serene and happy with her problems resolved.
I had a strange series of events when I came to Denver. Normally, I’d brush them off as chance but… I’ve only had one physical sign, also in 2009 and immediately after the Lakewood visions. I left my girlfriend’s apartment at 2 am and drove along Alki Beach, where a white dove suddenly shot out from the brush and hit my driver-side mirror. A month later I was driving to Portland and something, probably part of a truck tire, flew across from the opposite highway, bounced in the median and slammed into my windshield at 100mph. The windshield instantly shattered and I was blinded by mud. I pulled over quickly and surveyed the car. The driver-side mirror was gone.
It could be chance.
Still, the timing seems odd, coming immediately after the Lakewood shooting.
So when I came to Denver…. I walked to a nearby Target and bought something which left seven cents in my hand. Usually I’d put it in my pocket but that day I toyed with it and dropped a penny. I reached down but it was gone. There was a quarter there instead.
How odd. How long could a quarter lay in front of a busy Target? I picked it up and went home. The next month I was at Target again and thought how odd if I found another quarter. I walked out and there it was. Another quarter.
Now I’m freaked out. What are the odds? Two pennies, maybe. But quarters? How often do you find a quarter on heavily traveled ground? I checked the ground carefully that month, finding several pennies, a couple of nickels but never a quarter.
The next month I walked to Target again, almost expecting a quarter. And it wasn’t on the busy walkway this time but in the parking lot. I can’t stop thinking about it. Now I check the ground each day, week after week, but never find another quarter until I’m at the goth club. I’m reading my phone and a reflection catches my eye. I glance down and there’s a quarter by my foot.
It could all be coincidence but the odds are astronomical. What are the odds of three quarters in three trips to Target? It must be millions to one. Three in a row? I can’t remember the last time I found a quarter on the ground.
Roger Ebert was an atheist until shortly before he died, which isn’t unusual. But I can’t stop thinking about some of his last words. He had a vision of the afterlife and told his wife, “This [world] is an elaborate hoax”.
That phrase plays over and over in my mind,
