Karhythms and Coincidences - Part One

On Karhythms and Coincidence.  Part One.

When I was a young artist, someone, an older artist friend, gave me a copy of the novel The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho.   It’s the allegorical story of a young shepherd and his journey to Egypt from his homeland in Andalusia.  It’s a book about finding one’s own destiny.  The underlying New Age message is that if you really want something, the entire universe conspires to help you along your journey to achieve your dreams. It’s like that book The Secret.  Now, according to one theory, which I will elude to from time to time, destiny is the plan you laid out for yourself before you were born; when you were ready to return to earth and face your karmic sentence.  But putting reincarnation aside for a moment, the book was a great inspiration to me as a young writer setting out to chase my dreams.  I should buy a copy and give it to a young artist I know.  I’m sad to report that I lost my copy along the way.

There was another book out around that same time titled The Celestine Prophecy by James Redfield.  This novel’s theme is similar in that it is about paying attention to the signs of life, especially the coincidences.  These coincidences and happenstances work like road signs along the way, essentially.  So in my early adult years I paid attention to coincidences and took note of the strange twists in life’s tale.  Many of the biggest moves in my lifetime have been shrouded by these strange events.

Two teachers, one my junior year, followed by another, more adamant one my senior year, steered me toward writing.  I had always been a writer but I didn’t realize that’s what you called someone who did it for fun.  My first book was written in kindergarten.  I can remember sitting at our kitchen table and drawing the picture of the super kid flying out his bedroom window.  He’d accidentally found some radioactive kool aid and acquired super powers as a consequence. The scientist who accidentally left the kool aid out was desperately trying to track the super kid down.  I was five so the words were spelled phonetically and it ended openly, as do some of my adult books.  I had my first success in sixth grade with my Boogerman series.   The heartfelt story of a booger that comes to life and the people’s lives he touches.  So for whatever reason I have always been a writer.  My imagination is a fertile garden.  I don’t mean that as a boast, I’m just telling the truth.  I can’t help it.  It’s perhaps more of a curse than a gift.  It gave me frightening childhood nightmares.  It makes the world a strange and almost foreign place for me to navigate as an adult.  Ask my wife, I still have the mind of a child.  The question would be, where did that come from?  Genetics is to blame for a lot of it.  My father is an incredible story teller and my mother loves to read.  Now according to the theory, I chose that combination of personalities to achieve my destiny of becoming a writer in this life.  I had been in search of such a karmic pattern and found it mixed perfectly in them.  I chose to be left handed, thus more likely to be creative.

Okay.  I should stop here and explain something.  I enjoy thought experiments.  I love to suppose what-ifs.  This mindset allows me to consider anything without passing judgment on it as preposterous or impossible.  I imagine instead the implications of something if it were to be true.  But I have to fall back on my title, I don’t know, but neither do you.  That’s the whole point.  Anything’s possible to me.  It’s dangerous at times because you want to believe something and so you might get caught up in, say a conspiracy theory, and really let it affect your life.   I used to be like this when I was a young man as well.  Now I’m a bit more skeptical, but I still enjoying looking around at all the things I know and trying to see if the theory fits.   A lot of times there will be things you can point to and say well, that can’t be true and so the credibility of a theory loses its sway.   But as you can tell, I like the theory I’m eluding to so often here today.  I’m still looking for inconsistencies.  I’ve yet to find one.  I’m sure others will be able to. 

You might say “What’s the theory?” at this point.  We’ll get to that later. For now we’re only talking about one aspect of the much bigger theory.  This aspect shows up in many other theories.  Note: I sometimes refer to philosophies as theories. It keeps us all on the same playing board. 

So in college I took a job at Garfield’s Restaurant in the Joplin mall.  It is here that I met the people who would affect my life in tremendously profound ways.  For the first time, this group of friends understood the real me.  They saw the artist I was becoming and they treated me thusly.  They were fellow artists coming into their own as well.  We were a remarkable group, I have to admit.  The theory suggests we came together because we were supposed to.  Perhaps we’d even known each other before.  We certainly inspired one another.  I often joke that had we all studied music as children we would have become the next Beatles.  Only one of us had studied music, however.  He is the best guitarist I’ve ever known.  He indulged me by putting a few of my poems to music.  We likened ourselves to the modern beat generation, only of varying disciplines.  I think that most artists experience this early camaraderie with fellow artists.  I even think it happens with non-artist.  It’s when you’re looking for your mate so you run in packs.  It happens in college.  You leave your childhood and re-invent yourself at this age.   You form a band.  Maybe it’s not a musical band, but it’s a band non-the-less.  The Gang.  The Posse.  Some people in my home town formed them with their young adult church groups. 

So when one of our ilk moved to Chicago with his new wife and fellow comrade, I ventured up to visit them. This was at the end of their first summer in the windy city.  It all started when I was standing in my parents’ swimming pool talking on our cordless house phone.   This was back when that was still a thing.  It was my friend Paul and he was describing the view out of his thirteenth story apartment.  It is important to note that I have always been fascinated by large cities.  Growing up in the country, I always pretended to be in a big city.  I imagined looking out the window of my parents’ car and seeing tall buildings where fields were.   So I could picture in great detail what he was describing.  It sounded so incredible and to hear that he was able to live this way and it wasn’t scary or unsafe at all.  He lived in a very nice neighborhood.  Being naïve they’d moved to the Gold Coast.  They were in the thick of it, right above Division Street.  To see the Hancock Building they only had to look up.  He called to tell me they were filming a movie on his block.   He was watching actor Tim Roth walk along the sidewalk.  He tracked him into a bar across the street.  He hung up and rushed to the elevator and scuttled to the Hotsy Totsy Bar to stalk the famous actor.   He never mustered the courage to speak to the Reservoir Dogs star but he did strike up a conversation with the bar tender.   Tom Neery, as was his name, a name I would hear often in the coming years, though I never met the man, told Paul about a job opening at his former place of employment.  He even gave him the permission to use his name when applying.  They liked referrals there.  They didn’t trust complete strangers coming in off the street.  The bar was called The Last Act.  It was located exactly across the street from The Second City.  For you who are not from Chicago or familiar with comedy, The Second City is holy ground.  It is from here the likes of John Belushi, Bill Murray, John Candy, Mike Myers, Chris Farley, Tina Fey just to scratch the surface, all got their starts.  Saturday Night Live’s Lorne Michaels favorite hunting ground for talented comedians and improvisers is The Second City.  Now, a few things about me: I was obsessed with Saturday Night Live from the first episode I ever saw.  Both my brother Josh and I were both for ever changed by that experience.  The Church Lady was the first skit we watched.   Ironically or coincidentally, the ability to laugh at the Church Lady and not feel like I was sinning was the first step in my growing awareness of the hypocrisy and inconsistencies of my childhood religion.  I grew up very afraid of making a mistake and going to hell.  Another thing about me, I like to consider myself a fairly funny dude, when I’m in the right setting of course.   I was voted Class Clown and all.   My brother and I would do Hans and Franz impressions at family parties and in front of my parents’ Gang.  Ryan, my youngest brother, who is now an actor, could do every character Dana Carvey did.  So to me SNL was part of who I was growing up.  It had a major impact to say the least.

My friend Paul convinced me to come and stay for a few weeks.  It was early September, the best time of year to visit Chicago. His wife Cheri had inspired me to start reading Jack Kerouac and it all felt very On the Road to travel and sleep on his couch.  He was working at The Last Act Bar.  I asked him how funny some of the comedians were.  He said they didn’t have anything on us.  One of the things that had brought our group together besides our artistic natures was our senses of humor.  We were all funny dudes. 

I couldn’t wait to hang out at his work.  It was going to be the highlight of my visit.  I arrived and they picked me up from the airport.  I can still remember the feeling of driving up on and then into the tall buildings.  My neck was craned and my eyes full of moist astonishment.   Soundgarden’s “Black Hole Sun” was playing on the radio.  It was 1996. 

So the next day after I arrived we took bikes around the neighborhood and he gave me a local tour.  We went out to Oak Street Beach and then across to Lincoln Park.  We ended the tour by going to The Second City.  I stood and examined the carvings in the façade.  The faces.  Then Paul noticed that The Last Act wasn’t opened for lunch. They were supposed to be.  He took me through the alley and into the beer garden and then into the back door.  There behind the bar stood a stocky old man chewing on a cigar.  He was short and funny.  He was a man from another era; pissed off that his bartender didn’t show up.  He tried to call the guy but there was no answer.  The guy was Tom Neery’s best friend.  He even tried to call Tom.  He looked at me and asked Paul.                                      “You’re buddy know how to bartend?” he asked, removing the cigar stub and gesturing at me with it.

            “Sure,” I lied.  I’d waited tables for three years, I could figure it out.  So I called my mother and told her I was staying.  She said she figured as much when I’d left.  I slept on Paul and Cheri’s couch for a few weeks until we moved downstairs to a larger apartment and I slept on an air mattress in a spare room.  I came to study at The Second City for the next two years.  I received a lot of attention and it went to my head.  I was acting for fun, it wasn’t my dream.  It was to be a source of creative exercise to help my writing.  But there for a time, it appeared I could really pull it off.  I didn’t have a solid enough acting background to make the Second City Touring Company, so I left.  But I met some fascinating people, some I would later see on TV and in the movies.   By my second year, Paul and Cheri had learned enough about the city to realize that where they were living was not a practical place for two kids in school.  They were looking to move to a more reasonable neighborhood up north.  That’s when I decided to call the other members of our group still back home to come and have an adventure with me in Chicago.  Four of us rented a large, gorgeous apartment in Lakeview.  Eventually there came to be eight people who had worked at Garfield’s in Joplin Missouri living within a two block radius of each other in Chicago.  We called the central hub of this group, our big apartment, The Crow’s Nest.  Magic and insanity ran rampant in that place. The first Thanksgiving none of us went home and we enjoyed a raucous feast and I reflected on the strange events that had brought us all there.  It was here in The Crow’s Nest where we coined the term karhythm.  It was the combining of karma and rhythm as in the karmic rhythm of life.  We took notice of it throughout our journeys through the city and would report strange coincidences we’d come across.   Bill, an actual painting and sculpting artist, one day suggested a new name for a red crayon to be Neck Red.  On our way to lunch to Bamby Thai Restaurant, he sang the tune for Warrant’s “Cherry Pie” but the lyrics were “She’s my Bamby Thai, tastes so good makes the Chinese cry.  Sweet Bamby Thai.”  He stopped and knelt over and picked up a red crayon on the street and showed it to me.  “Karhythm?”  He put the crayon in his pocket.  In the year 1999, we vowed to really pay attention to the world.  Somewhere I have written down all the karhythms we reported to each other that year. 

TO BE CONTINUED…