The fundamental interconnectedness of being

With a blog named "The long dark tea-time of the soul" you'd expect me to believe in the fundamental interconnectedness of things. However it never ceases to amaze me when life really does appear to be fundamentally interconnected. Tonight I went to a Bay Area development planning meeting in San Francisco. Its one of those things that until a few months ago I would never have considered attending. But thats where you end up when you start taking an interesting in your own neighborhood and wondering just who is making all the important decisions and why.

So I'm riding the elevator to the 26th floor of some non-descript downtown skyscraper late at night and I think "wow, this is just like in that Josh Kornbluth movie, 'Haiku Tunnel' when Josh is skulking around some downtown skyscrapers late at night trying to post those letters... " I sit through the five hour planning meeting watching a bunch of planning commissions make decisions about how the city will be developed. At 11:30pm I get out of the meeting - five hours without food, drink or coffee (do I qualify for Survivor yet?) - and I take BART back home. Then as I get off BART at West Oakland I bump into an old friend of my girlfriend whom I haven't seen in over a year or more, and who just got laid off from Salon Magazine and hence is just about to leave town for Los Angeles. So it was probably just the last chance I would ever have of bumping into her and certainly the last opportunity to invite her to come to my girlfriends Art Exhibition (shameless plug). Even more bizarrely she just happened to know my travelling companion from the days when he worked from the City of Oakland.

Then I go home and I decide on a whim to listen to my voice mail that's been piling up and my friend is complaining about some 5Mb email he's been jamming up my mail servers with. So I go checking my server logs and there I notice that Josh Kornbluth was trying to send me an email today but failed because I'd retired my old email address due to too much spam. I send Josh some email telling him my new email address and he gets right back to me almost immediately and from his reply I find out Josh just started his own blog about taxation this week. So I'm posting a comment about taxation of The Rolling Stones on his blog when I think: "Wait a minute - wasn't I thinking about Josh earlier this evening riding the elevator to the meeting in 50 California?"

And just then I realized I knew what I would blog about this evening.