The Truth About Cats and Dogs

Chapter two on causality:

I found myself coming off of an 8.75 hour shift at work and driving home at 1am a couple days ago when I found myself stricken with the memory of the one and only occurence I in my life where I created roadkill (not something I think of regularly). This was about 10 years ago.

At the time I had assumed that I had run over a rock or something but my friends informed me that it was a cat. Upon recalling this event I realized that I had always assumed that the cat was an orange tabby type cat although I had never seen it. I began to think that perhaps it was a black cat and that in that case I couldn't be blamed for not having seen it since it was nighttime (realizing of course that the fact that I had not seen it at all makes the point of the color of the cat rather moot).

Upon this thought I became compelled to drive back to the place where I had hit this cat to look for some sign of something, (I've decided to open my mind to these types of thoughts more recently for reasons I intend on posting up here at some point), without actually having the faintest idea of what that might be. So I decided to follow this inspiration and drive the 20ish minutes out of my way to the road down by the Abbotsford Airport where this had occured.

I drove slowly (actually below the speed limit) to the place where all this had happened, all the while keeping my eyes and mind open for whatever I was being directed to this place to see. I passed a security guard and an old person walking with his/her bike but neither gave me any sort of sensation that they were what I was looking for.

Then as I approached the place where I was headed I saw a black dog, probably a rottweiler, walking on the road in precisely the same area where I had hit the cat. It wandered off the road and I drove up next to it and we just looked at each other for a few moments before I decided to drive back home.

I took two lessons from this experience: 1) Everything happens for a reason, and 2) which I have decided to learn from metaphorically, sometimes when you're looking for a cat, you find a dog.

Grand Theft Auto

Lately I've been thinking a lot about causality and what makes things happen. I've perused some ideas on the subject like chaos theory and non-reductionism but they don't really do any justice to how mind blowing an isolated event can be. For example, my mother stole a car two days ago. She took a stranger's car from the mall and drove it home without their consent. Now, in order for this to happen it took some very specific people in some very specific times and places doing very specific things.

I would have had to lend her my car, which is something I've done approximately five times since I purchased my car. I would have to own a very specific model and color of car, due also to the fact that I replaced my last one just this past fall since I rolled my last one into a ditch. My mother would have to be at the mall, in Abbotsford, in the early evening, parked in the immediate vicinity of an identical make, model, and color. It would probably have to be dark. And, of course, my key would have to work on the door and ignition of aforementioned identical car exactly once.