Shuffle Synchronicities: Volume 1 - #251

"Hell Raiser" by Dee Watkins - 09/25/21

Sep 26, 2021

Substack has been attracting more and more ‘high-level talent’, as they say at my day job, most recently with the widely publicized Salman Rushdie Substack.

Which is a great thing!

Famous musicians like Jeff Tweedy of Wilco and Neko Case have recently launched Substacks that are now at the top of the top paid Music Substacks chart.

However, that has also knocked higher profile music writers like Sasha Frere-Jones and Ray Padgett (who guest posted for us here) down the charts.

Which has then knocked Shuffle Synchronicities down to #23!

While my ego is certainly invested in this enterprise and there are of course financial benefits to getting more paid subscribers…

More than anything I’d like to keep the Shuffle Synchronicities Substack in the top #25 so it can remain easily ‘discoverable’ for other potential readers out there to benefit from.

So if you have been thinking about becoming a paid Subscriber, now’s a great time!

"Hell Raiser" by Dee Watkins

This 2019 Dee Watkins rap song was featured by Pitchfork as a must-hear calling him a ‘rascal’ and a ‘scoundrel’ and that he ‘is a bit like watching Matthew Broderick in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off: You get the sense the delinquents are having more fun.’

When I shuffled to the song, I was looking for some insight into tonight’s plan to see James Blake at the Hollywood Bowl with the therapist woman I wrote about in part in this post last week and about how her meeting me on a date in August helped her meet someone new in September that she’s dating long-distance now.

James Blake first came up in the Shuffle in this March post with his song “I Mind”.

Which I analyzed then to be about the relationship between ‘enlightened’ not wanting & ‘egoic’ wanting, specifically sexual desire, in the way that the song repeats the words:

I mind
(Pussy)
I mind
(Pussy)
I mind
(Pussy)
I mind

Over and over.

It was funny, a reader of the Substack, who is a relatively well-known music writer from the first generation of rock critics of the late 60s/early 70s, reached out after reading that post and urged me to try to date the therapist woman.

So I told her:

And she wrote back:

Anyway, yeah, so we’re going to see James Blake tonight on another non-date date.

I also did a shuffle of just all of James Blake’s songs just now and got:

“I’ll Come Too”

Which feels like a synchronicity now doesn’t it?

I was originally considering going to the concert by myself.

But she said, Sure, I’ll come too.

There’s also this line in it:

I'll slot right in between the
Cracks between you and him

LOL.

But, no, that’s not the ego-plan.

Even if it’s clearly in my id.

Which has apparently sparked my superego to declare it’ll prevent my ego from doing such a thing

She’s right now taking a virtual class on Buddhist Psychology with Jack Kornfield and Spirit Rock today so hopefully she finds this amusing too.

I, myself, have been reading Sandra Maitri’s The Enneagram of Passions and Virtues, and she has just quoted Jung:

“In fact we shall see clearly how this uncertainty forces the enthusiast to puff up his truths, of which he feels none too sure, and to win proselytes to his side in order that his followers may prove to himself the values and trustworthiness of his own convictions. Nor is he altogether so happy in his fund of knowledge as to be able to hold out alone; at bottom he feels isolated by it, and the secret fear of being left alone with it induces him to trot out his opinions and interpretations in and out of season, because only when convincing someone else does he feel safe from gnawing doubts.”

In other words, see my appeal for Subscribers!