I can’t help looking for meaning in tonight’s ‘mystery of a dollar bill’

By David McElroy · July 13, 2018

Humans like to find hidden meanings, even when there’s no meaning to be found. When odd things happen, there has to be an explanation. Right?

Tonight, I’m looking for meaning in a mysterious dollar bill that showed up on the windshield of my car a few minutes ago.

I had been writing at Chick-fil-A for a couple of hours and left about 9:30 p.m. As I started my car, I noticed there was something under one of my windshield wipers. I was dumbfounded to realize it was money.

I got out of the car and looked around. There were other cars all around me, but none of them had stray dollar bills. I asked a couple of people nearby if they had seen anyone near my car, but nobody had noticed anything.

And now I’m left trying to construct a narrative around the mystery of this wrinkled dollar bill.

Maybe somebody wanted to do some small, random good deed for someone. Maybe that’s the only meaning. Maybe someone had a spare dollar in his or her pocket and stuck it on a random car in a fit of good will toward random humans.

Or maybe it was a token of good will from someone who randomly met me tonight.

Anybody who is around me for longs knows that I have conservations with random strangers all the time. Tonight, I talked with a young mother who had a 7-week old baby who had been premature. The baby’s grandmother was also there and the three of us had a pleasant conversation about the baby and the experience of having a premie. They seemed pleased to have a stranger ooh and aah over their little man. I wished them a good evening after 10 minutes and that was all.

Shortly after — right as they were leaving — I ran out to my car to grab my camera for a sunset picture. (The sunset has nothing to do with this story, but I’ll put a copy at the end anyway.) As I got my camera, I spoke to them again and wished them a safe trip back to Atlanta, where they were from.

Then I went off across the street the get a decent angle of reflected light in the clouds.

Could those people have been responsible for the dollar bill on my car?

I realize I’m stretching, but I like a narrative that makes sense to me — at least in some way. The random good will explanation seems more likely, I suppose, but it’s not the sort of thing I’ve ever heard of. Of course, I’ve never heard of strangers sticking money on the car of someone they just met, either.

So I have no explanations that make sense. I guess I never will. And this bugs me.

Does it mean something? Am I supposed to understand a message which I’m overlooking? Is it random? Is it intentional? Or is there some “message from the Universe” I’m supposed to see in this? None of the explanations make sense.

I like stories. I like explanations. I like the endings of stories to make sense — unlike the typical French film, but that’s another issue. So I’m sitting here trying to see a pattern or meaning or explanation, but I’m not finding one.

In a way, this reminds me of a mysterious note that someone left on my car last year, but this one makes even less sense. At least that note was in English, even if its intention wasn’t clear.

Apophenia is the word for the human tendency to look for patterns in meaningless random data. Maybe that’s what’s going on here. Maybe there’s no meaning. Maybe I should just pocket my free dollar and happily move on.

But something in me wants meaning and an explanation. It doesn’t appear I’m going to find one tonight.

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Something small just made me happy. The specifics don’t matter, but I found myself smiling and I felt a kind of warm joy filling my heart and mind. In that brief moment of ecstasy, I felt the irrational desire to talk with a particular person. It wasn’t a calculated thought or a rational want. It wasn’t even that I wanted to tell the person about this particular thing. I simply felt ecstatic joy — and I somehow connected that feeling to this person. I can’t explain it. If we’re wise, we’ll pay attention to such moments, because the instincts of our hearts and minds often know more truth than our conscious and rational brains do. The same thing can be true in moments of great pain and suffering. If we pay attention to who our hearts are drawn to in such moments — of extreme joy or extreme hurt — we learn something about ourselves. I don’t know why. I only know that our gut instincts sometimes understand deep truths about ourselves that our rational brains haven’t yet figured out.

It started out as a satirical joke, but some friends liked the idea, so now it’s a real Facebook profile picture frame. If you’ve never heard of Moms Against Virtue-Signaling, let me explain. One of the dumber elements of social media is that it allows people to publicly signal their goodness and virtue to others — without actually doing anything of substance. So you see photo frames around profile photos saying things such as, “Moms Against Racism,” as though they’re standing up against those evil moms who are in favor of racism. It’s meaningless virtue-signaling and it deserves to be mocked, so I made a frame and published it on Facebook’s frame system today. If you go to your own Facebook profile picture and add a frame, then search for Moms Against Virtue-Signaling, you can select it. About a dozen of my friends are using it so far. It’s just fun satire — at least until Facebook decides it “goes against our community standards.” Or something. It’s just a fun way of mocking something that deserves to be mocked.

When I first told you about the project that would become DavidMcElroy.TV, I thought it would launch by mid-May. Since today is the last day of May — and I’m still not close to launching a finished product — here’s a brief update. The graphic above is the latest rough mockup of the format, but it’s still subject to change. Even the logo isn’t yet set in stone. Motion graphics are really difficult when you’re starting from scratch. Sunday night, my camera stopped recording, so it has to be sent off for repair. I have an older camera that I’ll keep using for testing, but I can’t launch without the better one. The audio system developed a low buzz this weekend that has me puzzled. I’ll be taking all the equipment over to the home of a local audio engineer who’s volunteered to help me figure out what I’ve done wrong. On top of all that, my on-camera performance seems to get worse with each test I do. There are days when I think I’m crazy to be attempting this. And in truth, I probably am insane to do it, but being crazy has never stopped me before. I’m at least a month away from launch and it could be a few months. Thanks for being patient — and thanks for all the support and enthusiasm for the project that you’ve sent my way.

I received the first dose of a COVID-19 vaccine Monday — and I’m happy to report that I’m neither dead nor a zombie controlled by Bill Gates and Co. Eligibility was recently opened in Alabama to everyone who’s 16 or older, so I signed up for the Pfizer vaccine at a site run by a local university. I know this is a political issue for a lot of people, but that honestly baffles me. We can disagree about whether such a vaccine should be mandatory — which I’m against — but as a voluntary choice, it seems like an easy choice now that it’s been safely given to millions of people. Is it a perfect preventative? Of course not. But the decision seemed obvious to me when looking at the statistics and evidence. I haven’t had any of the side effects that some people have experienced, but that’s supposed to be more of an issue after the second dose, which I’ll get on May 3. In the meantime, I’ll let you know if I grow a third arm — or if the secret microchip kicks in and someone starts trying to control me remotely. All kidding aside, getting the vaccine seems like a rational voluntary choice to me.

I get a lot of email from readers. Some of it is fascinating and useful. Some of it is full of confessions that people want to share with a stranger. Some people write to ask advice. What’s really surprising, though, is the small percentage that seems to come from mentally unbalanced people. When I started using the metaphor about being an alien — the tagline at the top of each page here — it never occurred to me that I’d start hearing from people who took it seriously. But every few months, I get a strange email — such as the one above from a few months back — from someone who seems to think I’m claiming to be an actual alien. The first time it happened, I laughed. By the time it became a semi-regular thing, I was simply appalled. For the record, I can provide no proof that I’m an alien, because … well … it’s just a metaphor. I do feel like an alien among human beings, but as far as I know, I’m just as earthbound as you are. It’s just a metaphor. Honest. Or at least, that’s what my lizard-beast overlords told me to say.

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