"Collect Them All"

 This one is not about leadership nor about interpersonal interactions. 

You could say this post is about subtle communication.  

You know how you may have never heard a word used before and suddenly that word is everywhere? Or how you are discussing a song you haven't heard in a while and then it pops up on your playlist? Or you mention a movie and there it is playing on TV later than evening. 

Of course we realize that when we Google search for something or click on an ad on social media suddenly every ad you see is for a similar product. We know how those algorithms work. And we also know that Alexa and all our other devices are constantly listening to us and modify marketing and messaging to coincide with our "interests." 

But here is one for Sherlock Holmes. 

About 15 years ago I submitted a short fiction story to a contest in Writer's Digest. We were supposed to write a short-short story of less than 750 based on a prompt that suggests a child finds a human tooth in a gumball machine.  

I recently uncovered it while cleaning out some old files and was contemplating publishing it on Patreon. 

My strange story takes place in the bizarre future world first introduced in the 1966 science-fiction novel Make Room! Make Room! by Harry Harrison, but familiar to more people because of the 1978 movie Soylent Green. If you are not familiar with the concept, the basic premise was that in the excessively overpopulated world where food and water were in short supply, the government created a new food source. It was a mystery substance that by the end of the story turns out [SPOILER ALERT] to be made from people. 

So I took the concept to another bizarre level. Projecting further into the future where people have now accepted the fact that when they get old or ill, they get sent to the processing plant. As it turns out in this insane world, some unusable parts are made available to the public for a variety of purposes. 

In this case, teeth and other small bones are sold in vending machines, to be collected and made into jewelry. Yep. A bit twisted story, I agree. 

Unfortunately, I missed the deadline and submitted the story too late. And so this story had languished in my files for years. 

Okay, so the stage is set for the weirdness that happened.  

Yesterday, my wife and I went to Michael's to get some craft supplies for a wedding gift she was making. Roaming around the store, we encountered a bunch of Halloween items, even though it is still early July. 

And there, on a shelf was the strangest thing I have ever seen. 

Practically my story come to life.  

I have no explanation for this except that somehow I communicated to the universe that I wanted to resurrect this weird little tale and share it with the world.

If you don't believe in manifesting what we think about, well, perhaps this is an opportunity to reconsider that stance. 

Meanwhile, if you'd like to read this bizarre little story, I put it on my Patreon page under my fiction pen name Jonathon Fiore. https://bit.ly/3RDBtog

Happy reading,