
1.
When I woke up the universe was different.
Let me modify that. It was fundamentally—no, wrong word—operationally, similar.
But not the same.
It was a modified universe.
First was the fog. There’s never fog where I live. Well, not much. But on this Tuesday morning ground fog was everywhere outside. Pervasive. Like the famed London fog of a century ago, before they stopped using chimney fires. There it was. Some of it as thick as soup.
I woke at 5.30 a.m. and, dang, it was still there by 9.30 in the morning. I was working from home and this struck me as slightly weird.
But, hey, no big deal.
I mean—it’s just fog.
Next, bicycles. While I sat on the porch drinking coffee a couple rode past on their mountain bikes.
And, whoaa, if they didn’t both have three wheels!
Not like a tricycle, but three wheels in a row. One behind the other. In sequence.
Never saw that before.
I thought, well that’s some new trend. Like motorized paddle boards. Or goat yoga.
Ten minutes later, some older dude pedaled right past my porch on this ancient Schwinn. It was like a 30-year old ten speed. And—no kidding, three frickin’ wheels. One-after-the-other.
I stood and shook my head and soon noticed Major Paradigm Discrepancy Number 3:
A Honda Civic drove past with lights on because of the fog. The left back light was about half as bright as the right back light. It also blinked.
Big deal?
Well, yeah.
Because ten minutes earlier a UPS truck had driven through my neighborhood.
And, guess what?
Same thing. Dimmer back light on the left, blinking.
Remember that Tom Hanks movie where he was a castaway on a desert isle and then came back home? He worked for Federal Express. But in the movie the Fedex box he had kept and later delivered had gold angel wings painted on it. And we wondered what that was about—because normal FedEx boxes don’t have gold angel wings.
But you just had to accept it.
That was how it was. Mildly tweaked reality: fog, extra wheel, wonky brake lights. Like being in a movie that is slightly different from reality.
But I accepted it.
I left my second cup of coffee on the porch table and went for a walk. On the way I opened a cell phone and began typing a text to my editor.
Then I noticed that the keyboard had no X.
None.
Do you know how unsettling it is to wake up in a world with only 25 letters in the English alphabet?

2.
I understand, from an avid reader and a lay person’s point of view, the basics of quantum entanglement, of worm holes linking black holes, of multiverses and of Schroedinger’s cat never really being quite dead or alive but statistically leaning one way or the other. I get it.
I read the Dancing Wu Li Masters in youth and recently bought a special edition of Scientific American where all these physics wizards from John Hopkins and Oxford and Berkeley and the CERN laboratory near Geneva explain all this mind-boggling stuff in an easy to grasp lay persons’ terms.
Sure.
I still have to reread and learn to difference between the many worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics and the cosmological theory of the multiverse. I mean one was caused by the Big Bang and the other just reflects the nature of reality.
Something like that.
Right?
So on this foggy Tuesday morning about a block and a half from my house an ambulance whizzed past, flashing pink and green lights—think about those colors—and, instead of blaring a siren, it blasted Frank Sinatra’s I Did it My Way. It must have been a bad accident because three minutes later a cop car whizzed past.
You guessed it.
Same again: pink, green, Sinatra.
Here were my choices: I could tell someone in authority about having woken up in an altered universe, but no one else looked rattled by these colors and siren sounds and they might try to put me into a loony bin.
I could wait to wake up, and meanwhile do nothing.
Or, being quite certain I was actually awake, I could learn to surf this dip into an alternate reality.
Maybe my bank account had more funds? Or maybe women asked dudes out on dates?
Heck, maybe eating carbohydrates and drinking red wine would actually make me thinner.
Regardless, I was quite satisfied at having adopted this new mercenary attitude.
Maybe I could pedal a bestseller: How to Get Rich and Improve Your Love Life By Slipping into An Alternate Universe in 6 Easy Steps. The first being somehow to wake up and seek confirmation by looking for three wheeled bicycles.
Only I wasn’t sure how to go about consciously doing that.

3.
Then I met Mary.
I drove to my editor’s office and on the way got a flat tire and was fixing it along the roadside when a car pulled up beside me and this redhead exited and insisted she help. So I let her hand me lug bolts and thanked her before she left, but first she leaned over and rubbed her left cheek against my left cheek, cat style, before she walked away. She told me her name was Mary.
I thought that was just some hippy-dippy college crap like girls saying ‘namaste,’ or maybe something cultural like French folks kissing each others’ cheeks. But after that, I pulled over to a 7-11 store and bought some unleaded gas and a Kit Kat bar, and damn if the girl behind the counter—ponytails and dungarees—leaned over and did the same!
It felt good. Like a more intimate version of ‘Have a nice day.’
Maybe this alternate universe had changed not only in nature and engineering but also social and cultural norms. Alhough I can’t grasp the benefits of that bizarre third bicycle wheel I certainly felt happier after those cheek rubs. It was like sharing a family cooked dinner in rural Italy. There was something intimately, unquantifiable beneficial about those cheek rubs.
It’s hard to share verbally. Sort of like being unable to describe an altered state of consciousness because, well, adequate words have not been invented.

4.
A month later there was still all this damn fog.
Beside that, a few other reality modifications arrived as surprises.
You didn’t have to pay credit card bills by any date for years, and the interest didn’t get higher. Newly constructed churches had no roofs and congregations brought their umbrellas. The Central African Republic and Guyana didn’t exist. And China had not one, but nine time zones. Mick Jagger was a born again Christian and had quit singing. The solar system still included Pluto as a planet, but had two other new planets. And, most tattoos were phosphorescent.

5.
Beside that, life stayed much unchanged.
I kept writing articles with words that didn’t include X’s, and my pay slips were the same (although bonuses were given at Halloween instead of Christmas).
The fog was like that incessant rain in the original Blade Runner movie, so I just got used to it.
I still baked bread during weekends and went running for exercise because I wasn’t getting near one of those three wheeled bikes.
One day I took my car in to get the radio fixed and damn if the mechanic didn’t turn my way, wipe her hands on a dingy towel and smile.
It was Mary.
Two weeks later my father in law (this is weird: he now sported an earring) was walking with me around Home Depot. He was telling me about problems he was having with the transmission in his Ford truck and at that very moment red haired Mary pushed her cart around the aisle and almost hit us.
Cheek rub. Smiles.
I noticed that there was an association with meeting Mary and automotive issues. This was a strange but not unwelcome coincidence.
Okay.
Read the next words carefully. Because they are really important.
I noticed this coincidence thing with Mary because, knowing that I was living in a somewhat benevolent but Kafkayesque Wonderland, my awareness of everything that was even mildly different was heightened. Otherwise, I would probably not have thought much about the Mary/car thing.

6.
One reason that the multiverse theory exists, at least from my simplistic reading and understanding, is because—theoretically—about 68 percent of the universe is made of ‘dark energy.’
That’s a shocker. Only about five percent is made up of atoms and molecules and stuff that we usually think about when we think of the word ‘matter.’ I mean, that’s what we grew up with.
Dark energy is probably the stuff that is making the universe expand. That means stars are moving away from each other faster and faster and in about a trillion years from now, if we even exist, we would not be able to see stars in the next galaxy because they would have high-tailed it way away from us faster than the speed of light (don’t ask; I really don’t know).
The problem with this theory is that, in reality, there’s still too little measurable energy floating around our universe to tally with this hypothesis.
So, one explanation is that there are many universes, perhaps clustered like bubbles, and that ours just happens to have an abnormally low dose of dark energy. That energy forcing the universe to expand has the pretty cool name of ‘Cosomological Constant.’
Apparently Einstein thought of that. Something to do with his general theory of relativity.
But that reason they gave for the existence of a multiverse?
I don’t buy it.
Here’s why.
When I read about this in Scientific American (picked up at the airport), I thought it was a sort of brazen scientific cop-out.
Let me explain.
Imagine that your dad had asked you, when you were a kid, why you had already spent the allowance money he gave you. And then you told him not to worry because, in an alternate universe, you had not only saved it but had invested it and made a bundle.
See? Think your dad would buy that?
No way!
But some guys were getting away with making up these theories. They added a doctorate to their title, published a few photon related studies, quoted Einstein and somehow literally swept uncertainties away by pointing to a lil’ old otherly dimensional universe (or universes, plural) as the carpet under which to hide their loose ends.
Nice try.
But I don’t buy it.
Not yet, anyhow.

7.
The Mary events were the first time I really took notice of coincidences. I don’t know why. Maybe because she was kind of cute. I’d never really paid much attention to them before. After that, I noticed more coincidences. God winking, as someone once said. Were they meaningful? I have no idea. Vehicle problems and poof! Mary appears. But they showed me that the fabric of reality, the viscosity of experience, was different than what I had considered before. The very engine that drove and sustained evolution appeared to have one very slight gear cog ratio alteration that no school teacher had ever clued us into. I mean, this crap was illogical.
In other words, the very underyling physics of this new reality in which I woke up to differed slightly from the two bicycle wheeled paradigm I had once lived in.
It’s like living in Africa and realizing that events occur differently there. When your car breaks down on a remote road in the middle of a desert, another vehicle will almost certainly appear out of nowhere to aid you, simply because the very bedrock of that old continent exudes this almost inherent connectedness, even benevolence, that helps generate the appearance of assistance—although statistically unlikely—right when you needed it.
But that’s another story.

8.
My clever and eloquent Scientific American writers explained that one way to describe the similarities between the two types of singularities—black holes and those that occurred with the Big Bang (singularities are where space and time operate differently than we know)—is to realize that black holes have a boundary (even though it’s a bit wobbly and ill defined and is, oddly, two-dimensional) called an ‘event horizon.’ Slip inside this and you can never come out again. Not only because gravity is too strong, but because the interior is in the future and to get out, well, you would have to go back in time. Which is impossible.
At least improbable.
So that’s a black hole. The analogous boundary to the Big Bang is something we can’t see because we are inside of it. Basically we are a three dimensional universe wrapped, like a cheese and beef filling inside a taco shell, within a four-dimensional spatial universe. The interface between these two universes is akin, in terms of being a boundary, to the event horizon of a black hole. They call our universe a brane, and the larger universe a bulk. These sound to me like words from a Marvel comic strip. (At least they’re easier to remember than the current model for the history of the universe, which is the Lambda Cold Dark Matter Cosmological Paradigm. I think you’ll agree that’s a mouthful. And not easy to remember.)
Here’s another interesting tidbit that the magazine taught me: when black holes collide at the speed of light they create gravity waves (talk about an extreme event) that send out reverberations in the fabric of space and time. People measure this, like to the width of a proton, both in Washington State and Louisiana in the U.S., as well as in Italy.
Seriously.
I’m not making this up.
Don’t buy it?
Click this link.
Told you.
But instead of hearing about this on the mainstream media—we’re just told about Hillary’s book tour and Trump’s tweets.
Talk about dumbing down our population.
Anyway, the point of talking about these articles is that there is some strange stuff going on in the universe (or in multiple universes) that most of us are completely unaware of.

9.
Remember when Samuel Taylor Coleridge (apparently in 1797), after smoking opium, began writing his poem Kubla Khan and then a stranger knocked on his front door and he answered it and when he came back his inspiration had vanished and he couldn’t finish his magnificent, luscious poem that takes us to the magical land where Alph the river ran?
Well, this piece I am writing is no poetical masterpiece, but I think it’s time to wrap it up – quickly. Before eating breakfast.
Otherwise I may forget the point.
Here we go.

10.
As my friend who works in TV tells me, when they stop shooting at the end of the day, they say, “Let’s wrap.”
Here’s the wrap.
Times change. The boundaries of our perceptions change. Our models of the universe change.
When I was in college, multiverses were not the rage and quantum entanglement did not equate with worm holes between black holes. And no one had ever measured a gravity wave.
As for what I wrote above?
Let’s say that my universe did not change overnight, but that these described events occurred over the space of, say, six years.
Maybe climate patterns shifted, or a volcano eruption had impacted worldwide weather patterns which generated more fog; maybe bicycle engineers found that three wheels worked more efficiently than two (and dealers even retrofitted old bikes); maybe traffic engineers decided to modify back lights for safety reasons, and that rubbing cheeks became more fashionable than handshakes. Maybe economists urged more flexibility in credit card payment dates (okay, that may be a bit far fetched) and scientists discovered more planets, and that a relative—after watching the new Blade Runner 2049 movie—learned that in real life the actor Harrison Ford had an earring, and so he decided to get one too. And consider that perhaps linguists convinced us that the letter X was superfluous and more planets were discovered and China decided to use time zones and new tattoo technologies emerged. Perhaps emergency rescue vehicles changed flashing light colors to reduce the impact on epileptic bystanders, and also realized that familiar music drew more attention than sirens.
Maybe religious leaders decided to cut costs and get people closer to the almighty by removing church roofs.
You get the idea.
Over a greater span of time, these changes would appear to be less bizarre.
But a person in that ‘normal’ timeline may never have noticed that coincidences can play a role in our lives, even though we may not yet understand them.
Unless pointed out by others whose opinions we respect, sometimes we only pay attention to common phenomena when our awareness is heightened—by being placed in a new or unusual situation.
When you read the story above and enter a fantasyland you will accept the Mary coincidence as both intriguing and agreeable.
The bizarre reality is that (although this was fiction) such events happen in our own lives.
That quantum mechanics/cosmological stuff?
Our contemporary scientific acceptance of the bizarre nature of physical reality (as highlighted with some of the astrophysics mentioned above) may allow more people (without fear of criticism), to stop being afraid of discussing unusual events, such as bizarre coincidences.
Regardless…if Scientific American proposes multiple universes with infinite possibilities, that’s like reading a religious text.
And, if true, meaningful coincidences certainly occur within that new paradigm.

Postscript.
I wrote the above in two bursts—one time at night and the other during the following morning.
This was along the Abruzzo coast of Italy.
Here is what happened within 48 hours of writing those words.
The following day the Wall Street Journal published an article titled When World’s Collide, Astronomers Watch. On the same day I wrote that piece, scientists apparently measured gravity waves from the collision, not of two black holes (which had already occurred in 2016), but between two very much more compact and denser neutron stars. The fact that this event commanded mainstream media attention is refreshing.
In the same issue the WSJ published an article titled The Science Behind Coincidences. It’s refreshing to see that the phenomenon of coincidences is gaining more mainstream attention.
The New Yorker Magazine included a review of the new Blade Runner 2049 movie, and mentioned that apparently Frank Sinatra music is played in that movie.
I began writing an article for Forbes about a new Rothschild resort in the French Alps. I then read that apparently it was in this village that Jacques Revaux composed the song ‘Comme d’Habitude’ in 1967, which is the French version of what became the song Frank Sinatra song ‘My Way.’
Within six hours of scribbling down the above piece, a group of us met and spent hours with an intelligent, energetic tour guide.
Her name?
María.
She has light red hair.
I kid you not.
Fortunately, no car problems.
**
Thanks for tuning into this less than usual edition of Roundwood Press. If you want to read my own books about coincidences, try clicking here and here.