Chance and Choice

I went on a designed magic hunt on Sunday.

I stepped out of my apartment building and flipped a coin.  Heads I go right, tails I go left.  It was tails.  So on I walked to Halsted.   There, I flipped the coin again.  Heads I go straight, tails I turn.  Tails again.  Which way should I turn?  Heads right, tails left.  Heads.  I went right, north on Halsted.

This went on for quite a while.  Each intersection presented me with three choices; keep walking straight, turn right, or turn left.  I let chance decide my choice for me.  But what about the choice of which side of the street to walk on?  That I didn't leave up to chance, but to my own personal feelings.  Whatever felt right.  What if I was on one side of the street, but there was a side street shooting off from the other side of the street?  Again, I would go with gut feeling on that, making up these rules as I went along, realizing there are way more choices out there than I had planned on.

And what about alleys?  What about shops?  Do I go in places?  Do I not?  How many times am I going to stop on the sidewalk to flip a coin like an insane eccentric person?  No...the coin will only be used for straight or turn, right or left.

And where does the magic come into play?  The idea was that through fate, I would be led to magic.  Through the coin and not my agenda, I would be brought someplace important.  Why would this even work?  Well, I looked at the coin...a quarter from 1978.  I was born in 1978.  I took this as enough of a sign to believe in what I was doing.

I found myself winding back and forth on the streets between Halsted and Clark.  I was looking for magic...just being open...

That's a little something I'm trying to really practice; leaving myself open to magic.  I've learned recently that there is sort of a series of things one has to do in order to be open to all of the amazing things that go on around us day after day after day.  First of all, you've got to take care of yourself.  The little things.  Take a shower.  Brush your teeth.  Laundry, dishes, eating right, all of those little simple things that are so easy to take for granted.  Clothes pile up, dishes pile up, it's easier to order some gross take out than to go to the grocery store, and on and on.

But when you take care of yourself, you have a better chance of being grounded.  Once grounded, it becomes easier to be in the present, to open yourself up to the world around you.  And weird things are happening all of the time in this world.  Strange and amazing coincidences.  Magic.

The coin I was using just happened to be from the same year as me.  Big deal, right?  But then walking down Kenmore I noticed a small slice from a tree branch lying on the ground.  It caught my attention.  I looked up at the tree it was next to and saw that recently several branches had been sawed off and taken away.

The realist way to describe this moment was that the tree caught my attention.  A more mystical way of putting it would be to say the tree held a certain kind of energy that I was attracted to and wank wank wank let's all hold hands and believe we can fly.  I know.  But check this out...

I look to my right, thinking this house, a three flat I think, could hold some significance.  The address on the front was...are you ready for this?

...my PIN for my debit card!  I'm not going to tell you what the PIN is, obviously.  But weird, right?

I'm saying this with a little projected sarcasm, but I just happened to stop at that spot and I just happened to have a connection with the number on the front of the house.  And the quarter just happened to share a birthday with me.  I walked on...

My coin flipping took me to Slaymaker, a fine art gallery on Clark and Roscoe.  I'm an artist!  Is it in the stars for me to go in there and make some sort of connection?  I became excited and went to the front door.  You couldn't just walk in, you had to ring a bell.  Suddenly, I decided that I shouldn't go inside.  Any place with a bell...the exclusiveness of that...it turned me off.  Chance brought me there, choice kept me out of there.  On I walked...

I started noticing that the majority of other people walking around, going in and out of bars on this football-less Sunday, seemed to be wearing sweatpants or pajama bottoms.  Not just dog walkers, but people together or in groups.  85% of folks, I would say, were wearing sweatpants.  Mostly light gray sweatpants.  A sign?  Something mystical?  Was this National Sweatpants Day?  What was this interesting development?  I walked on...

Eventually, a sleet storm began.  "The coin will take me home," I thought.  It didn't.  And I really had to take a crap.  So I abandoned chance and made a choice to get out of the sleet storm and get home.

A magical day?  I don't know...sort of?  A couple of interesting moments, sure.  But those brief little hints of magic occurred in only an hour's time.  Imagine if you lived most of your day, everyday, with the same focus?  Every time you walk out the door, you put out your feelers, your antennae, open to coincidence or, as it might be more fun to call it, magic?  What could happen?

I may not be using the coin very often as that was just sort of a fun experiment.  It takes away choice.  But other things happen in life too that remove choice.  The bus will come at a specific time.  It will get to your destination at its own pace.  That's chance.  But you can skip that bus and take the next one.  Or walk.  That's a choice.  And through the relationship between chance and choice comes an opportunity to be open to possible magic.

Ok, that's enough of that.  Have a great day and I'll talk to you later.

In The Brown Bag

The hope was to find a bag of money.  Some children dream of becoming astronauts, some of firemen, some of ballerinas.  Often, the jobs available to us as children are limited to the jobs we are introduced to on Sesame Street.  Some kids branch out from the options of police officer, teacher, and mailman to more fantastical occupations such as monster, princess, or wizard.

I bought into the more conservative path of future possibilities and wanted to be an astronaut for a bit.  Then I wanted to be a professional baseball player.  Then, a teacher of American history who also coached the basketball team.  Then, an actor.  And that's what I earned a degree in.  Acting.

After college, when the luster of acting wore off (and the reality of the business set in), I wanted to be a musician.  Then a writer.  An artist.  Maybe all of the above.  Currently, I'd like to just be able to pay rent.

But stronger than my desire to make a living off of any of these options was my desire to find a bag of money.

I've always loved treasure.  The idea of finding treasure is incredibly appealing to me and I'm not quite sure why.  The height of this desire was reached between 2008 and 2010 when I would go on change hunts through the streets of Chicago.  I would record how much change I would find, how many pennies, nickels, dimes, quarters, dollar coins, dollar bills, and those wonderful rare times I would find five, ten, and twenty dollar bills.  Each time I found a penny or a twenty, it was like some wonderful discovery in the greatest Easter Egg Hunt of all time.  I would check the parking meters and would frequently find ten to twenty quarters at once inside of the change dispenser.  There was a stretch where I found five twenty dollar bills, one each in March, April, May, June, and July.  When my change hunts came to an abrupt ending in August of 2010, I was finding between $80 and $100 a month.  It was incredible.

But I still never found that one brown paper sack filled with money.  The one with rolls and rolls, or stacks and stacks, of $100 bills.  My attention would perk up in an alley when I saw an old brown bag leaning against a dumpster.  Could this be it?  Nope...greasy paper towels and banana peels.  Here, on the sidewalk?  Nope...left over and forgotten Chinese food.

Once, when walking through Graceland Cemetery, I saw a brown paper bag packed with some sort of mystery.  This must be it!  My bag of money!  I walked towards the bag carefully, knelt down, and cautiously opened it up.  I found cloth...ribbons of cloth, scarves, perhaps.  And candles.  And then something that looked a little bit like meat.

Being careful not to touch it and now assuming the worst, I was able, with the aid of a stick that had fallen from a nearby winter tree, to see that what I was looking at was a dead, plucked chicken.  Head, wings, feet, everything intact.

I closed up the paper sack and brought it to the front building.  I went inside and said, "excuse me, but I found this brown paper bag out there with scarves, candles, and a dead chicken in it."

I expected the reaction to be shock or surprise, but without even looking at me, a man behind a counter said, "oh it's those Voodoo people again...just leave it on the table."

What is it about an anonymous paper bag that I love so much?  I acknowledge that a big part of it is the mystery of what could be inside...by why does my treasure lie within such a plain and common container?  My vision isn't of a treasure chest or an old tin box with valuables inside, though those are appealing visions in their own right.  My ideal transportation for my treasure is an old, greasy, forgotten brown paper bag.  Probably in the woods or in the park or cemetery someplace.

So while I continue to search for my disgusting bag treasure in the literal world, I'll attempt to fill up this literary brown bag with stories of treasure, of magic, and of discovery.  Strange things seem to happen to me and it's time I started writing them down and sharing them with the world.

And perhaps you too are searching for an old sack of treasure.  If I may be so bold, and if it doesn't sound too incredibly corny, maybe you've got my treasure sack and I've got yours.

On second thought, that doesn't sound corny.  It sounds dirty.

Thanks for reading.  Have a great day and I'll talk to you later.