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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On a live awards show Sunday night, one man made a joke about a female celebrity. The husband of the celebrity was offended and hit the man who made the joke. Or maybe it was staged for entertainment. Who knows? Who cares? Social media is full of discussion — and even arguments — about this idiocy today. This baffles me. Let’s assume for a moment that the event happened as reported. People have been having such idiotic fights ever since there have been humans. Half the bars in the world see such brief dustups regularly. It simply doesn’t matter. The fact that so many people believe they need to talk about this — or even need to have opinions about it — is more evidence of the bizarre media brainwashing that convinces many to care passionately about brain-dead trivia. Your life will be happier and saner if you focus on yourself, your family and your friends, not on whatever scripted (or spontaneous) bilge that the media wants to pipe into your home.

I’m in the middle of migrating this website to new servers this week. This means you might encounter some unexpected behavior until I get all the bugs worked out. Clicking on my links (including this one) might cause your browser to give you the message that it’s a site without a current security certificate. It’s not actually unsafe, but there’s something which isn’t yet set up for the security certificate. I apologize for any such errors you might encounter while the process is going on. If you notice any problems with content which didn’t migrate properly, I would appreciate you letting me know the details at davidmcelroy@mac.com. Thanks for your patience.

I often wonder what animals think when they look at us and consider the society we’ve created. Yes, I know this is fanciful and unrealistic, but what if they could? Would they be astounded at how we treat each other? Would they be disgusted by the ugliness and pettiness which fill so many of our daily interactions? The truth is that I’m feeling pretty disgusted with humanity tonight. I made the mistake of reading some online interactions that I should have avoided — and it sickened me. The people involved appeared to be vile and stupid and arrogant. I wish I could pretend they’re a tiny minority, but I know better. It’s times such as this when I most need to escape much of “civilization” and disconnect from their world. If humans are going to be worthy of “ruling this planet,” we have a lot of growth to do. And I fear that growth is nowhere in sight. So my buddy Thomas, above, and all of his friends would be right to judge us harshly — and to think, “Why do you folks get to be in charge?”

I should have expected this, but I honestly didn’t. The article I wrote last week about disagreements over treatment for autistic children brought me angry emails. You could almost call it “hate mail.” Of the five emails about it so far, two have been to tell me that I’m wrong to even listen to critics of the most popular therapy for autistic children — and the other three tell me I’m wrong for not condemning the treatment as the “obvious” abuse it is. If you read the article, you know I didn’t take a position on the issue, because I simply don’t know enough to have an opinion. But by talking about the issue, I stepped into a heated controversy. The emails from the two sides convinced me of nothing. But they did give me even more empathy for the unfortunate parents who have to figure out for themselves where the truth lies for their children.

Have you ever had what you thought was a new idea — and then discovered that “old you” had the same idea years ago? I had that experience tonight. And it’s been wonderful. I came up with an idea tonight for a very short satirical film that would be a promotion for a fictitious college. The point is to make the college promote — as good things — everything which is actually terrible about most modern colleges. Then I remembered a fake college that I invented back when I was in college. I had created student recruitment brochures and various newsletters back then, so I decided to call my “new” college by the same name I’d invented years ago: Ochita College. As I searched my computer for any old material I might still have about Ochita from the past, I discovered an email I sent to someone in 2009 — outlining essentially the same idea which I came up with tonight. Since I didn’t remember writing that, it felt like magic. So my next film project just might be this one instead. If all goes well, you might soon see “Ochita College: Your Future Starts Here.” This should be fun.

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