Greetings from a mostly absent blogger, Friends!
Tonight I'm here to share some randomness from my last week. Some of my readers 
may be familiar with the movie Repo Man (1984), and many might not be. Repo Man is a brilliant movie written and directed by Alex Cox that I became a little bit obsessed with for a few years as a teenager.
Tracey Walter may be familiar to you from any number
of roles he's offered. In Repo Man, he plays Miller. There's a scene when he's explaining his views on the randomness or synchronicity, or the "cosmic unconciousness" of life to Otto (played by Emilio Estevez!):
Miller: "A lot o' people don't realize what's really going on. They view life as a bunch o' unconnected incidents 'n things. They don't realize that there's this, like, lattice o' coincidence that lays on top o' everything. Give you an example; show you what I mean: suppose you're thinkin' about a plate o' shrimp. Suddenly someone'll say, like, plate, or shrimp, or plate o' shrimp out of the blue, no explanation. No point in lookin' for one, either. It's all part of a cosmic unconciousness."
Otto: "You eat a lot of acid, Miller, back in the hippie days?"
Miller: "I'll give you another instance: you know how everybody's into weirdness right now?..."
It has always been one of my favorite movie scenes, and the words "plate o' shrimp" come to mind a whole heck of a lot. Well, last week in the grocery store I had my own personal plate o' shrimp moment! The grocery store near my office has been undergoing a major renovation and part of the fun of the renovation has been that they moved absolutely everything in the entire store so I can't find anything anymore. I was wandering around the store at 8:00am, looking for soda. One might think the soda aisle should be easy to find, right? In my mind, it's with the snacky things... popcorn, chips, nuts, etc.
Well, 10 minutes or so into my hunting I found the soda - at the far end of the gigantic "ethnic foods" aisle. Huh? Yeah, apparently soda comes from an exotic land that must be near Asia, because it was closest to the Asian foods. On my way down the aisle, because I am easily distracted by shiny things and Asian foods, I stopped to survey the Asian food offerings. While I was surveying things familiar to me... various noodles, pad thai stuff, assorted sauces, etc - I saw a full shelf at eye level of Panko. 
"Hmm," I thought to myself. "Panko! I've never known what Panko is, nor have I made anything that called for it, nor have I looked for it, and I wouldn't have guessed it was Asian based on the name..." (In case you wonder, Panko is apparently an Asian bread crumb product used for breading various foods. Wikipedia says it's made from bread without crusts, so it's much lighter than traditional American or European breadings." I finally collected my scattered self enough to focus on the soda and head for the checkout.
Fast forward to the U-scan checkout. I'm fighting with the scanner that won't read my super-special-exclusive shopper's card, while two store employees are standing right next to the checkout discussing the virtues of various candy bars. (Keep in mind that the whole store has recently been re-set and the employees don't actually know where anything is shelved right now.)
Another shopper approaches the employees and asks if they can help her. She says "I can't find Panko anywhere." Whoa. I pipe up: "It's in the same aisle as the soda!!" All three look at me as though I am perhaps insane. The customer says to the employees "It's Asian, it would be in that aisle." Yep, it's in the ethnic-Asian-soda aisle!
It's all part of a cosmic unconciousness, I do believe.
