A Major Coincidence? Or Just Tomfoolery?

This morning over at Sentence of Dave I tried-- unsuccessfully-- to explain a coincidence that happened last night. My excuse is that I stayed up too late last night, watching LeCompt, the best bar band in the universe. My kids did not care. They got up at their usual time (as did my wife, and she went to a yoga class on the beach, so I had to hake the cobwebs off and go skim-boarding . . . a recipe for disaster.) My cognition is still fuzzy, but I'm going to channel T.J. and explain this with clips.

Before I go on vacation, I usually print out some songs to play on guitar. So last week I printed out "Space Oddity" by David Bowie, for no other reason than I thought my kids would like it. They are boys, and they like space ships and death. The song has both. In case you've forgotten:



So last night, while LeCompt was playing Neil Young's "Down by the River," a song my kids like because they find the lyrics intriguing, I told my cousin that I had been playing "Space Oddity" to my kids and they really liked it. Not ten seconds later, LeCompt launched into a fantastic cover of . . . you guessed it . . . "Space Oddity." For a moment, I felt like this:



But then I remembered something I read about coincidences. It was some back of the envelope calculations that illustrated it would be much weirder if coincidences like this did not occur. We encounter stimulus during all our waking moments, and our brains love to seek patterns and find meaning. And the constant bombardment are senses are subjected to guarantees that those one in a million type coincidences will happen quite often. It can't take more than a month or two for a million things to run through our consciousness, so we'll experience one of these wild coincidences once every month or two. Think of all the songs you mention that don't suddenly start playing on the radio or in the bar you are in . . .

But then I remembered this scene:



And so I have decided that this was no coincidence-- that LeCompt playing "Space Oddity" just after I mentioned "Space Oddity" is a profound omen. I am going to die in space. It is my destiny; it is inevitable and unavoidable. "But Dave," you say, "just don't go out into space. Do not ever get into a spaceship and you'll be able to avoid this terrible lonely death in the cold recesses of the universe."

It's not so easy. I will try to avoid spaceships, but for example, something like this will happen. I will be on vacation in Florida, and think I am at DisneyWorld getting on Space Mountain, but in actuality, I won't be at DisneyWorld, I'll be at Cape Canaveral. And I'll get on board a real spaceship instead of a ride and never even know it. And then I'll die in space. Or my friend will pull up in his new mini-van and say, "Get in," and I'll get in, but it won't be a new mini-van, it will be a spaceship. So there's no avoiding it, and I am resigned to my fate. At least it will cure this hangover.