Vegas, Baby

Is this sign a sign?

    Well that title may be a little misleading. It’s not really about Las Vegas, it’s more about the iconic “Welcome to Las Vegas” sign. And that’s really only the object of yet another one of my synchronistic-divine intervention moments. You can read about the previous two examples here and here. This time we're going to Vegas, baby.
    I was working on a photo in Photoshop. Basically I was experimenting with a photo I had taken back in November 2020. That particular shoot involved a 1960’s theme and the model was styled like a Vegas showgirl; I was doing a reproduction of a Robert McGinnis illustration that was from that era. So, like a lot of the times when I experiment in Photoshop, I picked a photo with the goal of just making something cool and interesting. Usually I’m just making something up as I go along. Since it was a 60’s shoot, I thought about including graphics of that era: mid-century graphics, atomic age graphics, etc. I worked on it for a few days and really liked how it looked. I had funky starbursts and atom icons, with warm, beautiful colors and nice geometrical shapes. Then I thought maybe I’d include the “Welcome to Las Vegas” sign and allude to the fact that model would be performing there. I found the sign quite easily in a google search and it was a png file that already had the photo on a white background; real easy to remove and place in my project. I worked on it for about an hour but ultimately decided it didn’t work and scrapped that idea. Later on the same night I finished watching season 3 of The Sinner that was just released on Netflix (originally aired on USA Network).

The Sinner Det. Harry Ambrose played by Bill Pullman
(photo credit: Zach Dilgard/USA Network)

    I have watched all 3 seasons of The Sinner and enjoy the show, even though there are definitely some things which do not seem plausible at all, for example (spoiler alert) I think the number of people willing to be buried alive temporarily by someone they suspect of murder, regardless of the fact it might bring said person to trust them more, would always be absolutely zero. In fact I'm sure nobody would be willing to be buried by anyone. But that is not what this is about. I will say Bill Pullman is really good at playing Detective Harry Ambrose, a very interesting and complicated character. I was watching episode 7, where Harry finally opens up a box of his estranged father’s possessions. In an earlier episode, Harry reluctantly agrees for some items belonging to his father to be shipped to him from Michigan by the veteran home where he had been living before he died. In subsequent episodes we see the box and people allude to it but he doesn't open the box until episode 7. In the box are 4 items: a toaster manual, an artillery history book and a blank postcard sitting atop an empty picture frame. The postcard is a close up of the “Welcome to Las Vegas” sign.  On seeing the Vegas postcard my immediate reaction was one of surprise as I was just working on that sign in my photoshop project a few hours before. What’s going on here? Not sure why they chose these items to include in his dad’s box, the Vegas postcard in particular(maybe Las Vegas = Sinner)
    Obviously if these events hadn't occurred in a close approximation in time they wouldn’t be synchronistic. If I had worked on that photoshop project and then a month later saw that Sinner episode, I probably would not even have thought about it. So what does it mean when time is a factor? Also these occurrences have been getting closer in time. The first event, the San Francisco establishing shots in two different productions, occurred on consecutive nights, The second event, the StarTalk podcast and Places in the Heart movie happened on the same day with StarTalk in the morning and Places at night. This time there were only a few hours in between one Vegas sign and the other. Is this all just completely random? 

    Maybe all the things in the universe are in a big hopper: ideas, concepts, everything all mixed up and dispensed from the bottom, every second of every minute of every day. So sometimes similar things come out at the some time. If there are infinite things in this hopper then I guess it stands to reason that it is possible that this Vegas sign came out of this universal hopper to me in these two ways, at the same time. Or maybe this can all be explained by the infinite monkey theorem which states that a 1000 monkeys hitting random keys on a typewriter for an infinite amount of time will eventually conclude with the complete text to A Tale of Two Cities (I learned that from The Simpsons)? I'm also aware that if something is more popular, I’ll be more likely to see and hear about. There will be more inclusions of it in the hopper. If I had just been reading an article about Vegas and then a few hours later watched a movie where the characters end up in Vegas, that would not be anything to gasp at for Las Vegas is a popular subject. However, the things I’m writing about seem to be very specific things, not something you hear about on a regular basis. I don’t think I would have been surprised if, instead of the Las Vegas sign postcard in the box, it was a postcard of, let's say The Sands Hotel.

    I should note one difference this time, as opposed to the other two earlier times, is I thought about the Vegas sign, I specifically chose it for my Photoshop project. The other situations had been more passive. Other than choosing to watch the shows I watched, I didn’t have anything to with the coincidental things that ended up in the shows, the eventual reasons that I decided to write it all down in the first place: the same establishing shot used in two productions 35 years apart and a show talking about a certain phenomenon of tornados and then watching a movie that shows that phenomenon.

The actual photo project I was working on by the way with 
Olatsa Assasssin-without the Las Vegas sign

    So ultimately is there any meaning to any of this at all ? Am I just a simple man easily awed at  insignificant things? I don’t know, I guess it depends if I’m looking for something. Maybe, like a lot of y'all, I've got a lot of free time on my hands and I'm thinking too much. But I still say, damn, all of this is just weird and sometimes, "and I want you to fuckin' acknowledge it!", as Jules would say. I guess I'll continue to think about these incidents and wait for what other weird, synchronous moments that await me and figure out what it all means.  Ultimately this might amount to absolutely nothing but a waste of time or maybe these all could be clues that lead to answers to the universe.