My Year of Being Lucky - Chapter II

Now it is 1999. Things have been getting quite wobbly, as if I am shifting timelines or dimensions.  There are instances where things seem to appear out of nothing or disappear only to crop up in an unexpected place. Even more alarming, I have completely lost my inner sense of time passing.

  I can tell you the exact date: July 4^th. I’m at the Beach in Moss Landing with my friend Valerie Coulton. Around noon, she falls asleep on the blanket as I sit reading and worrying about how sunburnt I am about to get, being fair skinned. I hate wearing sunscreen so severe suffering seems inevitable.

Only minutes seem to pass when she awakens, looks at her watch and says we should start home to beat the traffic. Nearly four hours have passed. I look at my arms. No sign of sunburn. We pack up and head home as I cautiously avoid mentioning my inner state of confusion to my companion, something I have gotten good at over the years. I’m not alarmed at this point, simply relieved that I am not sunburned.

She sleeps again in the car as I ponder why I stopped wearing a watch over the past year, even though I have a beautiful gold Modavo watch my godmother gifted me for my fiftieth birthday. When the battery died, I tucked it away and forgot about it. Now, everywhere I go strangers approach me to ask what time it is. Even in summer when I wear short sleeves and no watch is visible. Was this a joke? 

Once, while standing next to a friend wearing a conspicuous watch as he gestured wildly telling a story and feeding the parking meter, a stranger approached us and asked me – me with my naked wrist – if I knew the time. “The time is NOW”, I joked. He laughed and walked away.

Point taken. That was the last time anyone ever asked me for help with their temporal bearings.

So, this begins the hardest part of the story for me to tell, which is why it took me so long to share it.  It almost sounds mystical, in the same way that quantum physics sounds mystical.

It is not. Things simply flow in different ways for different people. There is something at play for us, whether we notice it or not,  that is beyond the kinds of experiences recorded in our currently active gene pool. I suspect the “junk DNA” geneticists talk about is more likely asleep, forgotten, or disrupted somehow. Sidelined, by fear or manipulation.  It seems all too convenient that we are born into forgetfulness from lifetime to lifetime, given only the vaguest hints as to purpose, then thrust into a world of chaos and confusion.

You are welcome to override my story with your own analysis if you must, but I am going to tell you what I experienced as a fully functioning, successful member of a highly technical workforce at a level of deep engagement with what I can only refer to as machine code. We were navigating the incomprehensible bits and bytes of data, dealing with indisputable facts while the rest of the world came up with wild schemes for what to do if they could no longer access ATMs. Seriously, people were scared. And the media wavered between hyping fear and faking expertise, blurring the lines between feelings and facts, offering no convergence toward meaningful solutions. Much like we see in our w In the meantime, I was knee deep in the nuts and bolts of keeping data flowing, mining the substrate of a matrix that was about to fail disastrously. Our job was to shore it up until the Universe itself shifted into a more flexible timeline. One where the year didn’t matter for the time being.

The world of technology was incubating a multidimensional landscape of creative possibilities. Unfortunately, not everyone could navigate the change. Many would be overwhelmed, feeling left behind and offended. Others would discover an autonomous form of freedom now available to them, something the world had not experienced since before the Dark Ages.

In my little piece of the world, my own psyche shifted, and “My Year of Being Lucky” kicked into high gear when I accepted a job with Charles Schwab’s bold and resourceful technology team in October of 1999. The world was showing signs of a stable transition into the new millennium and the wave of panic that I surfed into good fortune was fading in the zeitgeist. My new job in downtown San Francisco meant that I could dream of a comfortable future, and with that, the magic began.

Coming Soon: Chapter III – My Homecoming