Creating False Connections

We all have a little bit of that crazy in us… the one that could fill a room up with newspaper clippings covering every inch of the walls and ceilings with strands of red yarn spider-webbing from random points everywhere and little red circles around seemingly random words. (Or maybe I simply have that bit of crazy in me and everyone else is perfectly normal. If so, please don’t enlighten me.)

The point is that we all create connections in our minds, in the little systems we create out of the world around us. We learn a new word and see it everywhere we go. We discover a new-to-us artist and find we have known of his work our whole lives. We live somewhere once for six months and it follows us the rest of our lives. Or, if we are really desperate for connection, we go place flowers on a fence after a celebrity dies.

I have far too many personal examples of this quirk to create a simple NonModern post about them all, but here is the latest example:

I have moved to a new address on a square in the city where I live. Back during the GDR days this Plaza was renamed after the Latin American democratically elected Marxist head of state, Salvador Allende. For the GDR he was a huge hero. Chile was seen as a huge example of the spread of their ideals. People openly wept in East Germany when he later died in a coup. Don’t see the connection? I also happened to live in Chile. Sure, it was over a decade later, but still.

As if that wasn’t enough, the date of that coup that led to Allende’s death was September 11, 1973! 39 years ago today. I was born that year. Could it have been destiny that I would end up living in Chile and then on the very Plaza in Germany that used to be named after a former President of Chile?!?

It doesn’t stop there! September 11, as everybody knows, is the date of that most terrible attack on the United States and… I was living in the United States at the time! I was watching live TV when the attacks occurred!

Is all of this mere coincidence, or are there greater forces and schemes at work here? Hmmmm?

Crazy!

Wait a minute.

Crazy?

Crazy.

I think I had better go to bed before I start requiring some sort of medication.