Last night, right before I was getting ready to go to bed, one of my step-sons came home from work and turned some teenage stoner movie on the television. It might have been Dazed and Confused, although I am not certain. In any case, the last thing I heard before turning in was the soundtrack playing Bob Dylan’s Hurricane. I thought it was an odd choice to serve as the backdrop for kids rolling around in their muscle cars, smoking pot, and having furtive backseat hook-ups. It was my last real thought of the day.
Then I woke up to discover that Ruben “Hurricane” Carter has passed away. I guess one term for this is “serendipity,” although that word usually carries a positive connotation that is completely lacking here. Maybe the word “synchronicity” is neutral enough to capture the moment.
It’s hard for the human brain not to impute some kind of cosmic meaning onto such concurrences, although it may be true that there are no big coincidences or small coincidences, just coincidences. But, then, one considers the odds that you will hear a song about a man who has just died without that song being played for precisely that reason. It seems like a big coincidence.
But it’s really just a trick my brain plays on me. Two unlikely things happened at roughly the same time. I want them to be related, but they’re not.
