Wonderland?

I had only planned to write about my 237 moment while reading a novel by an author I met last year at the Byron Bay Writers Festival.

A novel that I only just finished reading last week.
Before I could write my post however Philip S Hoffman overdosed on Groundhog Day, which just made my reading of the above book even eerily sync-ier . 

Philip in Next Stop Wonderland.
Birth-date 23/7/1967

The plot of Lights Out in Wonderland is about a guy that escapes from a rehab clinic in England and decides that he is going to kill himself, but first he wants to celebrate his friendship with his childhood friend who is now working in Japan as a seafood chef.
Unfortunately, his friend in a drunken party mood accidentally feeds a Japanese gangster poison fish, which eventually kills the gangster and puts the chef in jail to stand trial for murder while Gabriel heads off to Germany in a complicated plan to get the chef off the hook, before Gabriel can finally kill himself ... if he still wants to that is.

DBC Pierre

When I was reading the part about the fish poisoning this story about a mother and daughter dying in Bali of fish poisoning hit the headlines in Australia -
Bali deaths: 
Noelene and Yvana Bischoff likely died of food poisoning

A photo of Noelene and Yvana Bischoff at
a memorial for the mother and daughter

But what really blew me away was when I got to page 237 of 
Lights Out in Wonderland, well I guess it really hit me on page 236, but it covers all of page 237.
For those who have been following this blog, you would know that I worked for IKEA for 24 years before getting laid off in 2012.
Freedom at Last After 24+ Years  
A few Chinese New Year syncs here too.
I'm born in the Year of the Dragon ('64) and I lost my job in the

Year of the Dragon (2012).
Although Hoffman wasn't born in the Year of the Horse (he was born on 23/7/67) he did die in the Year of the Horse and from an overdose of Horse (a slang term for Heroin).

Now for synch-heads and Kubrick fans 237 is synonymous with Room 237 from the movie The Shining.

The IKEA Monkey

Hotel IKEA: Nightmare from Elmtaryd

When I told Rodney Ascher the director of Room 237 about The Shining/Kubrick theme in the Imagine Dragons music clip he told me that he wasn't familiar with Imagine Dragons songs, but knew the actor who played Kubrick in the clip. 
Weird, or what?
Pages 236/237 from Lights Out in Wonderland -
My gut heaves.
What looms up ahead is IKEA.
The place is monstrous, it's the Flugafen of commerce.
The car park alone seems to take us hours to cross.
My heart beats thinly as the building's shadow falls over us, and the dialogue fizzles out as I search for exits and places to run.
Left of the entrance a bank of check-out tills stretches to infinity like an international border, where hordes of ant-like shoppers bob with their goods.
Traffic only passes out.
Doors to the right give onto a foyer with a lift going up one short level.
Anna takes me to the lift, and upstairs we pass into a marked channel that twists into the distance through waves of furniture and chattels.
A cold sweat breaks over me.
The path cuts through shallows, tides and drifts of basic furnishings, past ladles and shelves, pots, cushions, sofas and tables.
There's only one direction of travel.
I come to feel unwell.
'I might just duck out for a cigarette.'
 I stop in a cluster of bathroom solutions, a sort of backwater out of the tidal flow.
A couple of other shoppers eddy briefly, but are soon swept out into deeper furniture.
I watch them whisked away on a flotsam of cup holders, soap dishes and waste bins.
'What's wrong with you? 'tuts Anna.
'We seem to have walked miles'.
'Pff - We're not even half way.
My persona faints dead inside me.
Prongs of icy panic set the scene spinning until I finally turn and flee, back past ladles, past bookshelves and sofas, arms flailing in a headlong fall towards the lift.
But its doors are shut.
There's no button down.
Over the banister I can see the world through the window, see people wondering in freedom, chattering, smoking.
But there is no escape for me.
The shop has been made escape proof.
I catch my breath.
A Swede has trapped me in a shop.
With a hangover.
Somewhere at a distance a vicious, cashmere-clad agent of the Master Limbo has perfected a trap for humans.
We're rats to him, mere units of profit, of such paltry intrinsic worth as to call for a one-way lift lest better judgement condemn the passage through a maze of his tills.
It's a laboratory of shopping.
A vivarium of human weakness.
The work of forces who'll will stop at nothing in their lust for gain.
And in Berlin! 
Town of the People! 
The pain is too much.
If it has reached here, this infection - it must have reached everywhere.
I glace around for bodies.
Surly not every rat had the fiber to get through.
Then I bolt back through the store, flash past mile after mile of Nordic pine, slowly mastering corners until the ground floor opens out before me like a harbour mouth.
Ahead on the shore goods trolleys roam a chaotic dock, and I aim for a bank of tills behind them.
The power of miracles propels me there, strides lengthening, arms thrusting like pistons, gaze darting across queues to judge the shortest one.
But there is no shortest one.
The tills are jammed with walking wounded.
I flit this way and that, but my hands are empty, consumers can't understand my lack of products, it's a club for those who have them, they're bonded by them.
I'm a heretic, a rouge cell, and in that way of organisms meeting deviants they mass together to obstruct and repel me.
My abduction is complete, it's a scene from Orwell's worst nightmare, of rats stupefied and milling with goods that aren't even built.
The Swede has even calculated the immune system of crowds!
In terror for my life, through a flak of exclamations and jostling, I finally burst through a loosely packed queue and vault an old lady's trolley to freedom.

 I also thought it was syncy that the main character is named Gabriel and the first time I really got struck by synchronicity in my life was when I was burying my cat in 1993 just as Peter Gabriel's song Digging in the Dirt came on my car radio.
Also, I like in the Imagine Dragons song I'm on Top of the World the lyrics -
" Waiting on this for a while now
Paying my dues to the dirt
I’ve been waiting to smile, ‘ay
Been holding it in for a while, ‘ay
Take you with me if I can
Been dreaming of this since a child
I’m on top of the world."
Gabriel (Peter)

Oddly enough, I found a Japanese sushi meal at a Chinese temple, which I thought was a bit weird. And it was a meal to celebrate the Year of the Horse, too, ironically enough, in hindsight.