As I was driving to the laundromat the morning of Monday, October 18th a bird flew from across the street and landed on the stop sign just as I was stopping. It remained perched there for a while looking around silently. I noticed the property was for sale, so I thought about whether I might like to live there. The bird eventually re-perched facing the opposite direction and then flew back across the street.

I turned right to see the longer side of the house. I continued driving down the block and saw a small black cat cross from right to left and lunge for a bird in a small tree. I had already seen this cat and crossed its path for the first time Saturday and then again on Sunday on the property where I was staying five blocks away. Along with the decorations around the neighborhood this cat reminded me that Halloween was coming.

When I arrived at the laundromat I spoke to the manager about the events, and she asked what kind of bird it was. We used the Merlin Bird ID app to determine that it was a Northern mockingbird. We looked up mockingbird symbolism and meanings and read and discussed some of the contents of this resource and others for a few minutes. A customer arrived, so I returned to my laundry. The next song to play on the radio was Everybody by Backstreet Boys, and I noticed some connections.

There is a part of that song that happens twice. It's a series of questions and answers. The first question is "Am I original?" I thought about that in relation to the mockingbird because it's known for mimicing/imitating sounds. Another connection is that I had taken the "back streets" to the laundromat instead of the main road which would have been faster. I looked up the music video, and to my surprise it was Halloween themed. Their tour bus breaks down and they have to stay in a haunted mansion. Towards the end they imitate the famous choreography from Michael Jackson's Thriller.

The mockingbird on the stop sign reminded me of the last line of the poem "Bahnhofstrasse" by James Joyce ("The signs that mock me as I go"). There are still more connections that I have not yet noticed. Some will register with me later, some may be pointed out to me by others, and over time new connections will form.

I saw the cat for the fourth time on Sunday and took a photo. It was in a yard on the left walking towards a truck parked in the street, so I slowed down as I approached in case it darted out from underneath. I stopped when I saw it had gone under the trailer, and it then crossed the street in front of me. All four times it has crossed the path I was taking almost as if it was its mission.

Today I decided to start reading a book that a colleague had given to me on Friday, and I recognized the spiral symbol on the title page from the "Everybody" video from the previous story. This book, The Art of Unit Testing, is organized into chapters within parts. Each new part has its own page, and the symbol is also used on those pages as well as the first page of every chapter and appendix.

I saw the cat again yesterday. It reminded me to document one final connection by the Halloween deadline. I added the image below to the slides on the home page because it highlights the spiral symbol on the girl's necklace and connects it to this series of stories. The photo was taken in 2008 after a Canibus concert in Los Angeles. Canibus was very cool and invited fans to take photos after a great performance. The connections within the photo accelerated my interest in the subject of synchronicity.

On Thursday, November 11th I went to the laundromat again. As soon as I arrived the NSYNC song "Bye Bye Bye" started playing on the radio. I immediately thought of the previous incident there with "Everybody" by Backstreet Boys because both bands were extremely popular "boy bands" with five members from the same time period. I went to work in search of more connections. Until then I had not even thought of the terms "NSYNC" and "synchronicity" together. The name of the album is No Strings Attached, which is one example of connections and networks represented in some physical form. I found more examples of that nature in the music video and outside of it.

The video starts by mimicking (like a mockingbird) a puppet show with the band members as live action puppets connected with bungee cords to a puppeteer played by Kim Smith. When she cuts Chris and Joey loose they fall into another world onto a moving train with her standing on a nearby car. They run away from her as she chases them towards the front of the train, and they jump from one car to the next which highlights the linked structure of the train which of course operates over a network of railroad tracks. The train goes over a bridge, which is yet another form of connection. Then they climb down a ladder into a passenger car. A ladder is like a vertical bridge. She follows them into the passenger car, but they seem to elude her again. She then cuts Justin loose, and he falls down some kind of hatch (which connects floors of a building) onto the ground level of a warehouse where she pursues him though a network of corridors with a pair of Dobermans. In the shots of Kim and the Dobermans there are a lot of exposed pipes running along the ceiling forming more physical networks. She eventually unleashes them so they can chase after him, but he seems to get away. When she cuts JC and Lance loose they fall into a red Dodge Viper RT/10 with her pursuing them in a silver BMW Z3 along roads which are of course another major example of a network. They also seem to escape her in the end of their action scene, yet at the end of the video she's still in control of them through the puppet show.

The following day I noticed an item on the ground in the parking spot next to mine. See below the discarded packaging from a couple of tubes of Krazy Glue. After inspecting it I knew I would be writing this story that same night ("I'm doing this tonight"). Like the asphalt that binds the mineral aggregate together to form the ground beneath the packaging, glue is yet another thing that is used for connecting things. The strength of the product is represented by a weight hanging from a series of links hooked onto the "U" in GLUE. The pattern of black bars behind the plastic, especially when combined with the white lines where the paper was ripped out by some other adhesive material, structurally resembles train tracks and ladders like there are in the first action scene of the video. I thought back to the first story in this series when I learned that the word "Bahnhofstrasse" means "Train Station Street." From Wikipedia I learned it's the name of the main downtown street in Zürich, Switzerland and that the street is "largely pedestrianised" yet "also an important link the Zürich tram network."