Welcome to The Mystical Underground

We’ve done several radio shows for Aliens in the Backyard, and have more shows scheduled. It’s an often overlooked publicity for books, with its own peculiar pace and texture, and you can do the show in your pajamas and who’s going to know? Radio even lends itself to synchros. But before we go there, a bit of background is in order.

Over the years, Rob and I have done our share of radio shows. We loved doing Coast to Coast with Art Bell back in the late 90s. He was an engaging host, with a genuine passion for the topics he discussed. Whitley Strieber’s Dreamland has also been fun and enjoyable. We’ve done that show twice, for our first two synchronicity books.  Whitley and his wife, Anne, are knowledgeable about the topics they take on, and understand the art of conversation. With them, you’re free to speculate, theorize, and you don’t have to hold back. We enjoyed the interview we did with Mike Clelland on one of the synchro books.  Mike engages, drills, asks unexpected questions.

We LOVED David Schrader’s show, Darkness Radio, that we did on February 14. He has a great sense of humor and that Midwestern affability that invites you to have a beer with him at the local watering hole after the show. He also knows his field – the paranormal –   and the questions he asks, the points he raises, are valid and insightful.

At one point in the show, we were talking about Charles Fontaine’s experience after he’d left the graveyard – and nine days before his encounter – when he found his pants filled with blood. His first thought was that he was going to die. His father had been diagnosed with colon cancer twenty years earlier and Charles believed it was now his turn. Before we could finish telling the story, the show  went to break.

One of the first subsequent commercials to air was a public service announcement about the importance of colon/rectal cancer screenings. Rob hurries into my office the phone at his ear, and says, “A synchro. Let’s pick up there!”

Wow, I thought, okay. A colon/rectal synchro. Not exactly elevated stuff, but okay, it’s a synchro, all right. Rob pointed it out to David when we went back on air and none of us really knew what it might mean… rectal alien probes?

Our daughter, Megan, is writing a novel. She has outlined it, written 30 pages that she sent us, and today  experienced a synchronicity that perfectly illustrates one of the secrets in our book 7 Secrets of Synchronicity.  The fourth secret, The Creative, is that creativity lies at the heart of synchronicity.  At the beginning of that chapter, we use a quote by physicists and author F David Peat: “The space between…is the space that lies between the observer and the observed; it is the space of the creative act that brings a poem or a painting to life.”

Or a novel.

In her novel, the protagonist, Riley Phoenix, 22, lives in a second story one-bedroom flat with lousy plumbing, in a neighborhood that isn’t very safe, and there’s no security whatsoever in the building – no cameras, no concierge, no security people. But she’s perfectly happy living by herself in this place.  Okay, that’s the setup for the synchro.

This weekend Megan drove over to Florida’s west coast to see a friend with whom she went to high school. Renie had recently moved and Megan hadn’t ever been to her place. So she got there, they went out on the town, and this morning, Megan bolted awake and realized she was in her character’s apartment.  Renie lives in a one-bedroom flat, on the second story of a building, in a not very safe area of town, and the building has no security whatsoever. And oh, Renie’s flat has terrible plumbing.

“It wasn’t like I walked into Renie’ place last night and thought, Wow, this is where Riley lives. It just hit me out of the blue this morning.  So I walked around, taking pictures of the place so I can now fill in the details of Riley’s flat.”

When she called to tell us the synchro, we told her it was a positive sign for her book and her creative process. She agreed, but added, “It’s because I have absolutely no resistance to writing this novel. I know I can do it.”

Pretty cool, huh?

Remember Bo Derek in the movie 10?

She played the quintessential woman that every man  desires. That face, that body, that presence. But it turns out that Bo is much more than her PR. She was featured in the Palm Beach Post at the beginning of polo season, 56 years old and still a 10, a horse breeder and activist, the natural to toss the first ball at the 10^th anniversary opening game at the International Polo Club.

The synchro for us in this story was  horses. We were  putting together a proposal for a bookazine on famous horses through history. Our town has quite a prolific history on horses, specifically those used in polo. Thanks in  large part to John Goodman,   the multimillionaire founder of the International Polo Club, Wellington is what, back in the sixties, we would call a Ta-ta community.

Ta-Ta is another name for lah-de-dah,  as in, Huh? Seriously?

But here’s the thing. We were writing about polo, about how it’s the game of kings, and this story about Bo Derek, the ’10 of 10s’ –royalty! – turns up in the fluff section of our local newspaper. You can tell that the interviewer was a bit overwhelmed at interviewing the perfect ’10.’ The questions were sort of silly, like, well, what does she admire about horses? Her response, though, was spot on: They have a sense of the game and they do learn and know what the goal is, the way they’ll fight off another horse and hold the line. It’s wonderful to see.”

 So these types of stories are the oddball synchros happening in our corner of the world. Nothing earth-shattering here, nothing that shakes us up or weirds us out too much. These synchros are perhaps, most of all, a trickster sort of entertainment, especially when the horse bookazine didn’t pan out – despite the fluff and the synchro!

In my daily perusal of statcounter, I discovered something I had never heard of called URLpulse. The hit came from Ottawa, Canada, home of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, who have shown an interest in our blog since we first wrote bout the Quebec encounters.  So I clicked on this link and learned a whole bunch of statistics about blogs and websites.

URL pulse uses a particular algorhythm to  arrive at the conclusions they present on their website – how many daily and monthly hits your website or blog receives, from which countries, some of the key words, all sorts of weird tidbits. We use one such site like this that tracks book sales on Amazon, using an algorhythm. The tally isn’t always exact – it’s sometimes way off. But it was accurate enough to tell me that when my publisher lowered the ebook price  of Esperanza to $2.99, it made a substantial difference in my ebook sales – hundreds in a single month. When they jacked the price up again to $11.99, sales fell sharply.

On URLpulse.co, your website or blog’s net worth is calculated according to how many hits you receive. Guess who number 1 is in the US and worldwide? Google. Each month, more than 64 billion pages are viewed, it receives more than one billion monthly visits, it has more than 9 million external links, and it’s estimate worth is $1.39 billion.

Facebook is number 2 in the U.S and worldwide. Monthly pages views: over 61 billion, with monthly visits at nearly 2 billion, with more than 13 million external links. Estimated worth? $1.29 billion.

Yahoo comes in at number 4 in US and worldwide with more than 17 billion monthly pages views, more than 2 billion monthly visits, worth $1.86 billion.

At this point, I wondered about number 3. Amazon? Nope, they come in at number 5 in U.S., 111 worldwide, with more than 11 billion monthly page views and more than 400 million monthly visits.Estimated worth? $304.45 million.

The iTunes website? It ranks 22 in the U.S., 26 worldwide.

At this point, I got curious about our industry – writers, publishers, agents.  Random House, one of the largest publishers with multiple imprints, is ranked at 5,829 in the U.S., 21,339 worldwide, with more than 2 million pages views a month, less than a million monthly visits, and its estimated worth is slightly more than half a million bucks.

Well, okay, how about JK Rowling and Stephen King? Rowling comes in at over 59,000 in the U.S., over 155,000 worldwide. Monthly page views number over 400,000 a month, with monthly visits at slightly over 165,000. The estimated worth of the site is $119,801.56.

This is where I began to think that maybe these algorhythms don’t work well. Rowling is the first billionaire author, her books have sold millions. Then I took a look at stephenking.com. It’s ranked at 17,177 in the U.S., 82,333 worldwide, with over a million pageviews a month, less than 200,000 monthly visits, with an estimated worth of $136,603.33. Really? That’s it for the great Stephen King?

I encourage you to check your own website or blog. Not every single one is listed, but we found ours – not the blog, but the website. Our website  is fairly static; we add stuff when the occasion arises. The blog, on the other hand, is a nearly daily endeavor. So these statistics apparently include the website and the blog and, according to our statcounter, they aren’t very accurate:

Our monthly visits run between eight to ten thousand. These include unique and repeat visitors. I’m not sure about the page views; the above figure seems too high, but I’ll have to keep closer track in the future. What really made me laugh about all this is the value placed on each visitor – less than a quarter. C’mon, the knowledge, information and insight that visitors and commenters provide are incalculable. Where do those attributes enter into algorhythms?

On February 12, President Obama gave his State of the Union address – which was great.  And Marco Rubio, a rising star in the Republican party, a senator from Florida, gave the Republican rebuttal, and it was a lie from start to finish.

The Republicans are struggling to rebrand and repackage themselves. Right now, it’s a party that cares only about the rich, that seeks to take women’s health back to the 1950s, that seeks to turn Medicare into a voucher system, to privatize Social Security, to redefine rape, to…well, you get the general idea. Rubio’s rebuttal, as one anchor put it, “was tinker-toys, a kid’s presentation of a philosophy at the 9^th grade level.”

First, Rubio said that Obama believed government was the answer to everything, that the free enterprise system was to blame for our economic woes, that higher taxes would solve our problems. He then went on to explain how he and his family had benefited from government programs – through education loans, Medicare for his parents,   and the lure of the American dream that anyone, anywhere, could achieve their full potential.

When I watched Rubio, my jaw dropped at the multitude of lies. He’s a member of the party that, under George W Bush, started two wars; created Homeland Security and the TSA, two huge government agencies whose number of employees is a government secret; under whose watch 9-11 happened; under whose watch we had the financial meltdown of 2008. Bush was a disaster for this country and for much of the world.  But Rubio seems to have forgotten all that. In Rubio’s world, Obamacare is the terrible  disaster that will bankrupt businesses, that robs people of the health care they now have, and just how are we going to pay for it all, anyway? Why should anyone be guaranteed health care?

Well, Marco, the Pentagon budget could pay for universal health care.

I’m not crazy about everything Obama does- I dislike the drone business,  that Gitmo is still open for business, and I don’t understand why we can’t end Afghanistan today rather than in 2014. I don’t understand why Obama hammers away about how great our military is and will continue to be. On the other hand, he  may be the most transformative and smartest president we’ve had in decades, with a unique background that effectively embraces a global humanity – and not just a community of  aging, rich white men.

Obama understands that as a country we can’t ignore the vulnerable, sick, and aging in our society. He understands that an affordable college education is intrinsic to our success and continued prosperity as a nation. He understands the need for a balance between government and private enterprise. He understands, as the Republicans do NOT, that equal rights must be extended to gays in society, in the military, across the board.

The synchro? Rob and I happened to have lunch today with Don, his off-road biking buddy, and Craig, Don’s brother-in-law. A spur of the moment thing.  I try not to have political discussions with people  I’ve just  met. I become obnoxious and intolerant of views that disenfranchise the many. Yet, Craig and I ended up having a civil and interesting conversation he initiated about politics, life, and all the rest of it.

He sounded reasonable on some issues – like unions. As a retired firefighter, he understands the importance of unions, which are supported by Democrats, not Republicans. He says he belongs to no political party, is disgusted with both parties, doesn’t understand why we are the world cop. OK, keep talking, Craig. Then he went through this long, convoluted thing about how he’s for equal rights for everyone but that he has a problem with the, well, legal marriage for gays.  I’m thinking, Huh?

“Really? It boils down to semantics for you?” I asked. “You think they should have all the rights as a heterosexual spouse in terms of property, death benefits, all of that, but that they shouldn’t be married?”

“Marriage,” Craig said, folding his hands together on the table, “is between one man and one woman. It’s in the Bible.”

At this point, I excused myself and said I needed to go next door to pick up a few groceries.

That’s how I felt during Rubio’s rebuttal, like I should excuse myself and find something else to do. The Republican Party, as it exists right now, is a dying paradigm. You can’t dismiss most of the electorate – women, Hispanics, gays, people of color, the poor and elderly, the vulnerable and disenfranchised – and win any election in this country. Even Rubio, whose parents are Cuban immigrants, who represents the rapidly expanding Hispanic electorate, can’t save this party, as it exists now, with a platform that benefits the few at the expense of the many.

A talisman is something which allegedly holds certain magical properties that protect us from harm, provide good luck, or communicate something we need to know. Or all of the above. I suppose we might call it a superstition. But when a particular pattern related to this talisman recurs again and again, we call it synchronicity: the coming together of inner and outer events in a way that is meaningful to the observer and that can’t be explained by cause and effect.

A talisman can be anything – an animal, a song, a book, a phrase, an object. My talisman is Frog. When a live frog appears in our home, it’s a signal that something big is coming. Whether the event is positive, negative or something in between seems to depend on the frog’s health, the room in which it’s found, and whether we can free it without hurting it.

For our friend Mike Perry of the UK,  white feathers are a talisman that usually indicate spirit communication and a positive affirmation that the soul lives on.  For our daughter, a dragonfly means communication and good luck. For other people, it might be the traditional rabbit’s foot, a ladybug, a shamrock. In fact, here are 50 good luck signs.

This evening, we received a neat story from David Wilson of Crossroad Press about his talisman. (Or is it talismen??)

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It was a normal day, nothing special going on.

I stopped to get my dry-cleaning, and as I got out of the car, I found a shiny, face-up 1983 penny right beside my car.  I’m not really superstitious, but sometimes…  anyway, I picked it up.

That same day:

I got an unexpected check for $900.

I got an e-mail from Clive Barker offering crazy-good help on a writing project.  He now is offering us some of his books.

I met the trustee of the estate of a dear, departed friend, Hugh Cave,  and became the publisher for all of that great man’s works.

I collect lucky pennies now and hand them out.  If I find one face down, I turn it.  If I have a penny, I place it face up where it can be found…

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…by you or me!