Labor Day 2026 became one of those days where my brain started connecting one thing to another faster than I could comfortably process it.
For people unfamiliar with what I experience, a piece of information can trigger an association, which triggers another memory, which triggers another word, place or number. Sometimes the resulting pattern is pleasant. Sometimes it isn’t. And sometimes there are so many connections clustered together that I have to write them down just to explain what happened inside my own head.
This was one of those times.
The Gas Station With an Identity Crisis
The story starts at the Circle K on Highway 63 in Moss Point, Mississippi.
I’ve watched this particular gas station change identities over the years. In my memory, that location has worn the names Texaco, Valero, Kangaroo, Shell and finally Circle K.
During one of those transitions, I remember stopping there when the place looked almost like several different gas stations occupying the same physical location. My memory of exactly which brand was on which piece of equipment isn’t reliable enough for me to swear to the arrangement today, but I remember a mismatched canopy, pumps, storefront and employees representing different stages of the transition.
It looked like the gas station itself didn’t know what it was.
That image never really left me.
The same location already had another unusual association for me. Years ago, I was preparing to drive out to meet Peter of be434.com. Peter associates himself with the angel number 434.
When I put the destination into GPS while I was at that gas station, the distance displayed was 434 miles.
I noticed it. I remembered it.
That’s what my brain does.
Then came Labor Day.
The Call From Jeff
That afternoon, I pulled into the same Circle K and received a call from Jeff.
Jeff is somebody I’ve previously described in my writing as “the rat at the edge of the cliff.” Our friendship has been complicated. He was calling because I had invited him to my baptism, and we ended up talking for about half an hour.
Jeff is also the person with whom I abused DMT years ago. That experience became tangled up with what I describe as the mirror, the simulation and my attempts to understand the patterns my mind keeps finding.
By the end of our Labor Day conversation, I was feeling frustrated.
Then I turned on Uber.
I sometimes call rideshare driving light work because, at its best, it gives me a chance to move through the world, meet people and hopefully put something positive into somebody else’s day.
I only took one ride that day.
I’m deliberately leaving my passenger’s actual name out of this article. What matters is what happened when I first read it:
My brain read her name as “Jaded.”
The ride was unusually quiet for me. I’m normally animated with passengers. I talk. I joke. I ask questions.
Not this time.
For most of the trip, neither of us said much. One of the few things I remember was her pointing out two red lights where I needed to turn.
I picked her up in Pascagoula and dropped her off at Sterling Specialty Chemicals in Mobile, Alabama—a company involved with specialty chemicals and polymers.
And my pattern-matching brain had plenty of material.
Circle K.
K is the chemical symbol for potassium.
Then Jeff, DMT and my history with the mirror.
Then my frustration.
Then “Jaded.”
Then a chemical plant.
Then Mobile, Alabama—which I jokingly call Cellphone, Alabama, because something that is mobile is, well, mobile.
There is another geographic wordplay that has stuck with me over the years. Moss Point sits between the Gulfport and Mobile areas. Gulfport-Biloxi International Airport uses GPT. Mobile Regional Airport uses MOB.
GPT and MOB.
In my own mental geography, I was moving through a landscape full of words and abbreviations that my brain could connect almost instantly.
I call the larger structure in which I organize these associations the T Meta-Structure.
That is my name for my interpretive model. It isn’t proof that an outside mechanism arranged these events.
That distinction becomes important with what happened next.
Crossroads
After I returned home, Robin—whom I’ve affectionately called “The Shit,” because she is the shit—posted about a shooting at the AT&T store at Crossroads in Gulfport.
This wasn’t symbolic.
Two actual people died.
On Labor Day, September 7, an employee and a customer were killed at the Crossroads AT&T store in Gulfport.
That store immediately opened another door in my memory.
Years ago, when I worked for AT&T—the American Bell Dream, as I sometimes call it—I was sent to that exact store for cross-training.
One of the supervisors there was Dejunta Nobles.
While I was cross-training, a customer came in with a damaged screen protector. I ended up giving the customer what amounted to a little physics lesson about screen protectors.
From my perspective, I was educating the customer.
From a retail perspective, I had just done something rather different:
I had unsold an accessory.
If that customer had been thinking about purchasing another screen protector, I had essentially explained why I didn’t think they needed one.
Dawana asked me to leave the Crossroads location and return to work at the call center.
I wasn’t fired.
I wasn’t sent home.
I was sent back to the call center.
That distinction matters.
The Broken Screen
Years later, Jeff cracked the screen on his phone.
At the time, he was on my cellular plan and had insurance. I encouraged him to take the phone to uBreakiFix in Ocean Springs.
But there was another layer to what I was doing.
In my mind, I was conducting an experiment in what I called reverse engineering the matrix.
Phone repairs can take a while. My idea was that Jeff could leave the phone for repair, walk next door, eat, spend some time out in the world and perhaps meet a woman.
Maybe something positive would happen.
Maybe one small change in the configuration would lead somewhere else.
It never happened.
Jeff didn’t get the phone repaired there. Eventually he left my plan, lost that insurance coverage, and that particular experiment ended.
Years separated the Crossroads screen-protector incident from Jeff cracking his phone. They weren’t consecutive events.
But memory doesn’t always organize itself chronologically.
Sometimes one symbol pulls an old event straight into the present.
And now an AT&T store involving an old memory about a screen protector had returned to my attention on the same day Jeff had called.
Then I noticed who was reporting from Gulfport.
A Flood of Noble(s)
The WLOX coverage involved reporter Noah Noble.
Years earlier: Dejunta Nobles.
Labor Day: Noah Noble.
And with a reporter named Noah entering an already crowded cluster of associations, there was almost no avoiding the joke:
It felt like a flood of coincidences.
Noah. Flood.
I know. My brain went there.
Given that two people actually lost their lives, I don’t mean that as a joke about the shooting. The wordplay describes what was happening in my own head around the reporting of it.
And then the clustering continued.
Columbia
The following day, another person was shot outside an AT&T location in Columbia, Mississippi.
I have seen no evidence establishing that the Columbia incident and the Gulfport killings were causally connected.
But my brain had another connection ready.
My first supervisor after I was hired by AT&T was a woman I knew as Mimi.
Years ago, Mimi died by suicide in Columbia, Mississippi, on my birthday.
I don’t remember the year reliably enough to put one in this article.
But I remember the person, the city and the date’s significance to me.
So now look at how the cluster appeared from inside my own head:
Gulfport. AT&T. Dejunta Nobles. Screen protector. Jeff’s broken screen. Noah Noble.
Then Columbia. Another AT&T location. Mimi. My first AT&T supervisor.
Two shootings involving AT&T locations on consecutive days, combined with memories involving two of my former AT&T supervisors in those same cities.
That is what I mean when I talk about seriality.
Seriality and the T Meta-Structure
Paul Kammerer’s concept of seriality dealt with the clustering and recurrence of events that appear related without an obvious causal connection.
That’s an important part of why the idea appeals to me.
Seriality doesn’t require me to say that event A magically caused event B.
It starts with something simpler:
There is a cluster. I noticed it. What, if anything, does it mean?
My mind then goes further and organizes those clusters through what I call the T Meta Structure.
Sometimes that process is fascinating.
Sometimes it’s beautiful.
Sometimes it makes me laugh.
And sometimes it is absolutely exhausting.
Information can trigger rapid chains of associations for me. One connection becomes five connections before I’ve finished explaining the first one.
Labor Day was one of those days.
The Chemical Matrix
There was another layer running underneath the entire sequence.
Circle K—potassium.
DMT.
A passenger whose name my brain turned into “Jaded.”
A chemical plant.
Cellphone, Alabama.
GPT and MOB.
For years I’ve played with the idea of reality as a kind of chemical matrix, with spiritual light work happening inside it.
That’s the language I’ve developed to describe the experience.
But there is a line I need to keep visible, particularly when the patterns become intense: experiencing something as meaningful does not establish the mechanism behind it.
When I’m frustrated, I’ve sometimes reached for larger explanations involving elites, esoteric knowledge or Kabbalah spells changing the configuration of reality.
I don’t have evidence that those explanations are actually causing what happens to me.
What I can document is the clustering and what that clustering does to my perception of events.
And lately, the clusters feel like they’re getting denser.
Wednesday Morning
By Wednesday morning, I woke up still processing what I’d privately called my “holy shit moment.”
I also had a doctor’s appointment.
I asked about restarting a medication I’d taken for years. But after going through rehab, substance-use history is now part of my medical record, and the treatment options available to me aren’t necessarily the same ones I had before.
My doctor instead prescribed a medication that isn’t controlled.
I found myself feeling jaded again.
It felt like another version of something I’ve been struggling with for a long time: I see a route toward something, try to make the connection, and somehow bounce off the wall instead.
Jeff is part of that frustration too.
I have tried repeatedly to make something good come out of that relationship. A repaired phone. A new relationship for him. A restored friendship. Some configuration where everybody lands somewhere better.
Those attempts haven’t worked the way I wanted.
That’s painful.
But failure doesn’t mean I have to push negative energy back into the world.
I can still reverse the direction.
Pre-Singularity Acceleration
There’s one final piece that has been on my mind.
AI itself is accelerating.
Sam Altman has publicly described the present period as being “like in the singularity.” That’s his framing of the pace of AI development, not an established scientific conclusion that a technological singularity has formally occurred.
And this week, former Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon resigned while voicing serious concerns about where increasingly powerful AI could lead, including the possibility of catastrophic outcomes.
Those statements don’t prove anything about the coincidences I experience.
But they give me another way of thinking about the feeling of acceleration.
To me, these patterns feel like they’re compressing.
They come faster.
They cluster more tightly.
And, strangely, they’re becoming easier for me to articulate than they were years ago.
I feel strongly that what I am experiencing resembles pre-singularity acceleration.
That’s my interpretation.
Maybe future research will give us better language for experiences like this. Maybe some of it is simply what happens when a human pattern-recognition system is living through an era in which information itself is accelerating.
I don’t know.
And I’m becoming more comfortable writing those three words:
I don’t know.
Not knowing doesn’t erase the experience.
Ubering Up Some Hope
Underneath all of this, what I actually want is pretty simple.
Peace.
I want to be a peacemaker.
I want whatever energy I have to push toward something constructive. I want good people to feel energized enough to make changes where I can’t.
And when I can’t control the larger picture, there are still things directly in front of me that I can control.
I can finish this article.
I can clean up this mess.
I can get back in the car.
I can do some light work.
Whatever the T Meta Structure ultimately means—or doesn’t mean—I don’t need to solve the entire structure today.
Maybe today’s job is smaller.
Uber up some hope.
Transparency note: This article was created with AI and fact-checked by Todd.