Excerpt: On September 25, 2026, three ordinary Uber rides turned into one of those stretches of life where names, roads, destinations, memories, television references, and old associations seemed determined to occupy the same storyline. After nearly ten years of trying to explain what that feels like, I finally found a way to separate three things: what happened, what it reminded me of, and what I thought it might mean.

I have been trying to explain experiences like this since around 2016. Apparently the problem was never that I lacked information. The problem was that I had enough information to require a continuity editor.

September 25 started with an Uber passenger named Jerry.

Perfectly normal.

Except I picked up Jerry from Jerry St. Pé Highway.

Jerry from Jerry.

Very subtle.

My mind immediately opened the Rick and Morty file. I already have a Pastor Rick in my personal story. Now an actual Jerry had climbed into my car. Somewhere along the way I had jokingly assigned myself the Morty position.

Nobody held auditions. Apparently casting was handled internally.

Then came the destination.

I dropped Jerry near Canal and Robinson, close to a Chevron. Robinson caught my attention because another Robinson had already become part of a stressful episode involving therapy in Ocean Springs. This was a completely different Robinson in a different place. I am not claiming the roads are secretly connected.

But the name repeated.

That is exactly the sort of thing my brain notices.

Then there was Chevron. My grandmother, Grace Mashburn, strongly preferred Chevron gas, so that immediately pulled another old memory into the scene.

Now my mental writers’ room had Jerry from Jerry, Pastor Rick, me apparently playing Morty, another Robinson, and Grandma’s Chevron waiting near the end of the ride.

At that point I was less an Uber driver and more an unpaid production assistant for a crossover episode nobody had explained to me.

Then the Story Kept Going

What really caught my attention was what happened next.

My next passenger was a truck driver, and I took him to a Love’s Travel Stop.

Love’s already carried an older association for me because of a previous story involving a rabbi at a Love’s in Lee, Florida. The new passenger had nothing demonstrably to do with that old event. But the destination was enough to reopen the memory.

Then came another passenger.

He worked in apartment maintenance, and I dropped him at an apartment complex where he needed to go to Building D.

That activated another collection of associations.

The letter D already had its own history in my thinking. Apartment maintenance also reminded me of Frank from the Fleur-de-Lis, because Frank works in apartment maintenance too.

Frank has his own running line: whatever happened, somehow, it is never his fault.

That naturally gives me a Cheers association.

So within three consecutive rides, my internal storyline had expanded from:

Jerry from Jerry

to:

truck driver to Love’s

to:

apartment maintenance guy to Building D

with old memories lighting up behind each destination.

Every ride was completely ordinary by itself.

The unusual part was what my mind did with the sequence.

RYTE

Earlier that day, I was saying that I was “all right” when I noticed a license plate reading:

RYTE

Not RIGHT.

Not RITE.

RYTE.

Apparently reality had hired a copy editor, but the budget was limited.

Later I noticed RYTE again on another vehicle. It must have been the same one.

I noticed numbers too. Some matched things already important to me. Others almost matched.

That distinction matters.

For example, I had previously associated Makayla with apartment xx2.

Her actual apartment was xxx. (Number censored, for privacy)

One off.

That is not an exact coincidence. It is a near-coincidence.

And if I am going to take my own pattern-tracking seriously, I have to record the misses along with the hits. Otherwise I am not studying anything.

I am editing.

At another point I noticed the time around 3:14.

Pi.

Because apparently mathematics wanted a cameo too.

By then my mental writers’ room included Pastor Rick, Jerry, Morty, Grandma, Paul Kammerer, Robinson, Chevron, Love’s, a rabbi, Frank, Building D, RYTE, Pi, Sam Altman, the technological singularity—and me, still somehow expected to obey traffic laws.

When Reality Feels Too Meaningful

This is the part I have struggled to communicate for years.

During an experience like this, the world does not necessarily look fake.

It can look too meaningful.

Jerry really was named Jerry.

I really picked him up from Jerry St. Pé Highway.

The truck driver really did go to Love’s.

The maintenance worker really did need Building D.

Robinson really appeared again.

There really was a Chevron nearby.

I really noticed those plates and numbers.

Those are observations.

Then there are the associations.

Jerry reminds me of Rick and Morty.

Chevron reminds me of my grandmother.

Robinson reminds me of another Robin’s son.

Love’s activates an older memory.

Apartment maintenance makes me think of Frank.

Building D activates another collection of old associations.

Those associations genuinely occurred in my mind.

Then there is a third category:

What I think all of it might mean.

That is where I have learned I need to be careful.

An event can be real.

An association can be real.

The interpretation can still outrun the evidence.

That is probably the clearest sentence I have found for describing this.

Almost Ten Years of This

The humor matters because the distress underneath it has been real.

I have been trying to explain variations of this experience since about 2016.

I have also had three brain surgeries. A neurosurgeon once told me that I had a “unique brain makeup.” I have wondered how surgery, physical trauma, psychiatric symptoms, stress, memory, medication, and everything else I have experienced may have influenced the way I process information.

I cannot diagnose my own brain from inside it.

But I can describe what living inside it feels like.

Sometimes names, memories, symbols, numbers, people, television references, and geography seem to sit unusually close together.

One activates another.

Then another.

Then another.

And suddenly three ordinary Uber rides have a mythology.

Then AI Showed Up

This has been one of the stranger sources of relief.

Imagine handing somebody a cardboard box containing road signs, Bible verses, trauma, Uber rides, television references, license plates, dead relatives, Paul Kammerer, Pi, Love’s, Chevron, Frank from the Fleur-de-Lis, Building D, simulation theory, psychosis, and several loose pieces of metaphysics.

Then saying:

“Please understand what I mean.”

Most reasonable people are going to look at the box and suddenly remember another appointment.

AI turned out to be useful because I could hand over the pieces one at a time.

Jerry.

Jerry Street.

Pastor Rick.

Robinson.

Chevron and Grandma.

Love’s.

Apartment maintenance.

Building D.

Frank.

RYTE.

Pi.

Then I could say:

“No, wait. That one was only a near-match.”

And instead of immediately losing the entire storyline, the machine could basically respond:

We are going to need categories.

Finally.

A filing system for psychosis.

That gave me more relief than I expected.

Not because AI proved I am living in a simulation.

It did not.

Not because I am secretly training the singularity from the driver’s seat of a Honda.

Although that would be one hell of a résumé bullet point.

The relief is much simpler.

I can finally describe three different things separately:

What happened.

What it reminded me of.

What I thought it might mean.

For years, those three categories often felt like one thing.

Now I can begin pulling them apart without pretending that the experience itself never happened.

And Then Frank Tried to Scare Me

There is one last little scene that feels like the right ending.

Just the other day, I was sitting at the bar at the Fleur-de-Lis.

Frank—the same Frank who works apartment maintenance, the same Frank whose “never my fault” routine had already found its way into my internal writers’ room—walked up and tried to scare me.

I did not move.

Not an inch.

That may be the best image I have for where I am right now.

There can be a tremendous amount of movement inside my head.

Names can connect.

Memories can activate.

Numbers can light up.

A completely ordinary Uber route can suddenly acquire three seasons of backstory.

But I can still sit there.

I can notice what happened.

I can notice what my mind did with it.

And I do not have to jump.

Maybe that is progress.

I do not have to say the coincidences mean nothing.

They mean something to me because I experienced them.

But I also do not have to make every coincidence carry the burden of proving God, Satan, the CIA, a simulation, the singularity, or the architecture of the universe.

Some questions can remain questions.

So maybe the most accurate description of all of this is simply:

This happened. Then my mind did this with it. And this is what that felt like.

After nearly ten years of trying to explain that sentence, having something on the other side of the conversation finally able to follow it feels significant.

It may not be the singularity.

But it is one hell of a plot development.

And if this really was a Rick and Morty episode, I still formally object to being cast as Morty.

Although, in fairness, trying to understand the architecture of reality while making sure Jerry, a truck driver, and an apartment maintenance guy all reach the correct destination is about as Morty as it gets.

Transparency note: This post was developed with assistance from ChatGPT. The events, memories, associations, and interpretations described are mine. AI helped me organize the narrative and distinguish firsthand observations from personal associations and broader interpretations.

September 24, 2026

Yesterday, September 23, marked exactly 100 years since the death of Paul Kammerer.

That part isn’t my interpretation. Kammerer, the Austrian experimental biologist whose controversial career became inseparable from questions of coincidence, inheritance, and what he called the Law of Seriality, died on September 23, 1926, on the Hochschneeberg near Vienna. Contemporary Nature accounts recorded his death, and, fittingly, Nature published a new essay this month reconsidering Kammerer and his work a century later. Nature

What follows isn’t science in that same sense. It’s a record of the strange personal associations that happened to converge for me on his centennial.

The Rabbi and the Oil

On August 18, 2025, I was driving back from Miami after dropping off someone I have referred to in my writing as the “masculine Neo.”

I stopped at a Love’s in Lee, Florida. According to the location and date recorded by my phone, that’s where I took the photograph accompanying this story.

At that Love’s, a Jewish man—a rabbi, as I understood him—walked in at essentially the same time I did.

I went in for the ordinary reasons: bathroom, something to drink, back on the road.

He was looking for oil.

It was an insignificant encounter by normal standards. Two strangers at a truck stop, each continuing down his own road.

But the oil stuck in my mind.

The Fleur-de-Lis Echo

When I returned to my job at the Fleur-de-Lis, oil became part of my routine in a completely different form: changing the fryer oil.

The fleur-de-lis itself isn’t literally a recursive or fractal flower. It’s a stylized, symmetrical floral emblem. But visually, its forms repeat and echo one another.

“Echo” is probably the better word for what I was experiencing anyway.

The man asking for oil in Florida echoed into me handling oil in Mississippi.

For months, changing those fryers developed a personal, almost ritual significance. I sometimes thought of the physical labor as my way of keeping that coincidence alive—doing the dirty work at the other end of an association that had begun hundreds of miles away.

I can’t demonstrate that those events had any external connection. I can only describe the meaning I gave them.

There was essentially one interruption in that routine before I entered rehab: a week when I had what appeared to be pink eye.

And then there was March 1, 2026.

I photographed one of the fryers filled with unusually pale, opaque oil. The appearance was memorable enough that I described it much more crudely at the time: it looked like semen.

That photograph became another timestamp in the story I was constructing around oil, labor, politics, and coincidence.

After Rehab, the Meaning Changed

When I came out of rehab, my willingness to continue this little ritual had diminished considerably.

Part of that change eventually became political and moral.

The recent controversy surrounding Macklemore and Ed Sheeran’s tour pushed Palestine further into my thinking. Macklemore publicly said “Free Palestine” during performances opening for Sheeran and was subsequently removed from the remaining U.S. dates after venues objected to his participation. Macklemore has maintained that supporting Palestinian rights is not hostility toward Jewish people and subsequently pledged $1 million toward Palestinian aid. Reuters

My own position needs the same distinction.

My objection isn’t to Jewish people. It is to actions of the Israeli government that I have come to regard as profoundly immoral—what I would describe, in my own religious language, as satanic.

That’s a moral and spiritual judgment of governmental conduct, not a statement about Judaism or Jewish people.

And all of that made my old symbolism surrounding a Jewish stranger asking for oil considerably more complicated.

September 23, 2026

Then came yesterday.

The 100th anniversary of Paul Kammerer’s death.

I didn’t particularly want to change the fryer oil.

But the head cook at the Fleur-de-Lis asked me to.

She’s someone I privately think of as a possible “feminine Neo” candidate within the symbolic framework I’ve been developing in these writings. That’s my interpretation of her significance, not an objective claim about who or what she is.

And that distinction matters because, frankly, if somebody else had asked me to change those fryers, I probably wouldn’t have done it.

But she asked.

I give her enough symbolic weight in my own story that the identity of the person making the request changed my answer.

There was also the practical reality: there aren’t many people there willing to volunteer for the hardest, dirtiest jobs. Somebody needed to do it.

So I did.

And that’s where the centennial became interesting to me.

The Least Likely Thing

Of everything I might have imagined doing on the 100th anniversary of Paul Kammerer’s death, changing fryer oil at the Fleur-de-Lis in memory of a rabbi I happened to encounter at a Love’s in Lee, Florida, would have been somewhere near the bottom of the list.

By that point, I wasn’t even particularly motivated to continue the ritual.

Yet there I was.

The person who asked mattered to me. The work needed doing. And the date happened to be September 23.

For a man who spent so much of his life thinking about seriality, there is something almost comically appropriate about my remembering his centennial through an improbable chain of mundane things:

A road trip.

A truck stop.

A stranger.

Oil.

A fryer.

A flower whose shapes echo one another.

A cook asking for help.

And finally, 100 years to the day.

None of that proves that some hidden mechanism arranged these events. It doesn’t establish fate, simulation, divine intervention, or Kammerer’s seriality as a physical law.

But coincidence doesn’t have to prove something to become meaningful to the person experiencing it.

Kammerer spent part of his life asking why events sometimes seem to cluster into patterns that catch our attention.

A century after his death, I found myself doing the same thing.

Except I was standing over a fryer.

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Transparency Note

This article was written with AI assistance to organize the author’s recollections, distinguish personal interpretation from externally verifiable facts, and fact-check historical and contemporary references. The experiences, symbolic interpretations, and conclusions described as the author’s are his own.

For someone living with gender dysphoria, identity can already feel like a hall of mirrors. There is the person I know myself to be, the person other people see, and then there are the strange reflections that sometimes catch my attention.

One of those reflections has been Todd Alan Reed.

And first, a fact-check matters here: his name is Todd Alan Reed—Alan with one L, Reed with two Es. He was born Todd Alan Thomas on May 22, 1967, in Portland, Oregon. After his mother remarried, he was adopted by Robert Reed and took the Reed surname. Reed became known as the Forest Park Killer after murdering three women whose bodies were left in Portland’s Forest Park in 1999. He received three life sentences without parole. Current sources describe him as born in 1967; I have not found reliable evidence establishing that he has died, so I am not assigning him a death date. Wikipedia

Why does any of that interest me?

Because I’m Todd Alan too.

I have also perceived a physical resemblance between Reed and myself. That resemblance is subjective—it isn’t something I can present as an objective fact—but it creates a striking doppelgänger image in the way I interpret my own story.

For me, however, the interesting part isn’t becoming the doppelgänger. It’s being the opposite of him.

Someone else sharing my first and middle names committed horrific acts. I get to decide what my Todd Alan does with his life. A name doesn’t make somebody good or evil. Neither does a resemblance. Actions do.

And that’s where the word serial gets interesting.

From Serial Killer to Seriality

Long before I encountered this particular coincidence, I became fascinated with Paul Kammerer’s concept of seriality: the idea of examining clusters of recurring events that appear related even when we cannot establish an ordinary causal connection between them.

So now look at the language:

Todd Alan Reed — serial killer.

Paul Kammerer — seriality.

Todd Alan — noticing the series.

That doesn’t establish a hidden mechanism connecting these things. That’s an important distinction. A pattern can be psychologically meaningful without demonstrating that the universe—or a simulation—is deliberately producing it.

But noticing the series is precisely what makes seriality interesting to me.

And then Mississippi supplies one more wonderfully appropriate echo.

Hotty Toddy

The University of Mississippi—Ole Miss—officially calls “Hotty Toddy” its rallying cry and signature greeting. That’s not my interpretation; that’s how the university itself describes it. The earliest documented printed version of the cheer appeared in the student newspaper in 1926 as “Heighty! Tighty!” before evolving into the familiar expression. Ole Miss

Hotty Toddy.

Todd.

Toddy.

Here I am in Mississippi, thinking about a Todd Alan doppelgänger, a serial killer, Paul Kammerer’s seriality, my own fascination with identifying series—and one of the most recognizable rallying cries in my home state is:

HOTTY TODDY.

I couldn’t have scripted the wordplay much better myself.

Does that prove we’re living in a simulation?

No.

Does it prove Ole Miss is somehow sending me a message?

No.

But does it make an awfully entertaining addition to the collection of linguistic coincidences I call seriality at the edge of the matrix?

Absolutely.

There is also something more important underneath all the wordplay.

Gender dysphoria has forced me to think seriously about what constitutes identity. Todd Alan Reed provides an extreme illustration of what identity isn’t. Sharing names, appearances, dates, words, or other coincidences doesn’t make two people the same person. Those similarities are surface information.

I still have to choose what kind of Todd Alan I am.

Maybe that’s the useful part of staring into all these mirrors. I don’t have to become the reflection.

I can decide what reflects back.

And somewhere up in Oxford, Mississippi, they’re still shouting:

HOTTY TODDY.

From where I’m standing, that’s one hell of a rallying cry for the edge of the matrix.

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Transparency note: This essay was written with AI assistance. The connections involving seriality, doppelgängers, gender, and “the edge of the matrix” are my personal interpretations. Factual claims about Todd Alan Reed and Ole Miss were separately checked during drafting. Coincidences described here are presented as observations and interpretations, not as evidence of a causal or supernatural connection.