I was watching What the Bleep the other day... one of the interviewees who mentally creates his own reality each morning said that he always includes a request for something to come up to show him that this is happening, some kind of synchronistic sign that he himself is the man behind the curtain.

Let me tell you a story. In the early nineties there were three very bright but countercultural, misanthropic, cynical slackers in San Francisco. Much of their interaction involved talking about how screwed up everything and everyone was. Your typical bohemian hipster outcasts. One was a cartoonist, one was a computer programmer who liked to design games, and one had a flunky office job and dreamed of a life of leisure.

The cartoonist met the computer programmer through the personal ads and then formed an uneasy friendship. The office worker met the cartoonist via his friend the programmer and ended up living together with the cartoonist for a while.

Then they all went their separate ways.

The computer programmer quit his job soon after and spent 10 years or so designing his games. Today I found out that my old friend the computer programmer, with his very first published game, just won the arguably the prestigious award in the game business, the spiel des jahres. www.spiel-des-jahres.com/cms/f...nt.php

I had seen a few months ago that the cartoonist had also done well for herself. Her animated movie that technically infringed on copyrights of songs written 80 years ago had gotten her coverage in the New York Times, it had been shown on PBS, and she was the now the darling of the intellectual property reform crowd. blog.ninapaley.com/

And the flunky office worker, which was me, made a lot of money in real estate and now lives on a lifestyle block in New Zealand without having to work a day job. That picture is from my front porch.

All of these successes are so improbable and personal that I must conclude that this is my message to myself, my sign that I am indeed creating my own reality, or at least that something very strange is going on.

Something good :-)