Random names pop into my head (Part 2)

Let’s get the elephant in the room out of the way right away, shall we? This post is titled “Random names pop into my head (Part 2)” but there was never a Part 1. Today, just moments ago, I opened my text editor and started a post that I titled “Intrusive Names”. I wrote a little, decided it wasn’t worth keeping around, and deleted it. In the process of deleting it, I saw that there was an unpublished draft in that same folder titled “names-come-into-your-head”. The post therein was titled “Random names pop into my head”. It was written in July of 2024.

I now share with you, for the sake of completeness, the content of that post.

I don’t know why, but sometimes a random name will pop into my head. A few days ago, I was washing some dishes and suddenly, I start repeating “Dustin Pedroia” in my head. I don’t know who that is. Is it a sports guy?

Sometimes I do know who it is. Sometimes it’s someone I went to school with (with whom I went to school, excuse me) in like 1989. Recently, as in just a couple of weeks ago, the name of a girl I went to high school with popped in the ol’ noggin. Maybe we went to junior high together as well, but I don’t really remember. She had the thickest accent – the kind of accent that people from that place have. We had a couple classes together, but weren’t friends. Friendly whenever we did interact, but that wasn’t often. Well, dear reader, I did a quick Duck Duck GOosing and she’s dead. Which isn’t terribly weird, right? People die all the time. But she died this year, just a couple months ago. And that struck me as weird.

And then it struck me as weird that it struck me as weird that something that happens to literally 100% of people, for literally 100% of time, throughout literally 100% of space, happened to someone I knew a little once.

See, I was sitting at my desk and in the midst of the stream of nonsense propositions that never cease passing before the microphone on the stage of my mind, a name made itself apparent to me. It’s a name belonging to a person who I knew when we were both children. He sat in front of me in our seventh grade English class (maybe it was called ’language arts’, I can’t remember). That teacher tried to instill in us the importance and value of keeping a journal. So, every day at the start of class, we had to spend five or ten minutes writing in a composition notebook. By the end of the term we had to have roughly a full page for every day of class that we’d had, the teacher would collect the books and go through them to make sure we’d all done all of our writing.

I remember precisely one thing about all of that writing I did. And it’s this: I spent at least some time writing about how the kid in front of me often wrote about an imagined feud he was having with one of the pigeons we’d sometimes see outside the window.

This is, of course, silly and completely unremarkable. The fact I’m remarking on it now is surely a debit in my moral ledger, evidence of some sort of defect of my character.

But what if I told you that many years later, beyond the point past which that pigeon was just a vague memory in anyone’s mind, I knew someone on the internet who one day, out of apparently nowhere, started talking about a pigeon they were dating?

Is that weird? Is it anything?