the Dictator

Sunday, September 13, 2026, began for me at the Fleur De Lis Bar and Grill in Pascagoula and ended in the water at Lyons Lake in Moss Point.

Between those two places, the day became another example of what I call seriality: names, numbers, sounds, timing, personal associations, and real-world events overlapping in ways that catch my attention.

Some parts of this story are ordinary, independently verifiable events. Other parts describe the metaphysical framework through which I experienced them. I am documenting the pattern as I experienced it, not claiming that I have proven a mechanism connecting these events.

Labor and the Reverse Flow

While I was in rehab, I watched material from Dr. Nicole Labor about addiction and how the brain works.

Her name immediately created an association for me.

I once had a Russian Blue cat named Nicole.

Nicole. Labor.

And labor means work.

That became connected to an idea I have been experimenting with while working at Fleur De Lis. Rather than sitting in front of a television and simply absorbing a Saints game, I try to do actual labor.

Wash dishes. Clean. Move. Work.

Within my simulation framework, I think of this as attempting a reverse energy flow: putting effort outward instead of passively taking information in through what I sometimes call the “glass of deception.”

My intention is positive. In my own metaphysical model, I imagine that energy either helping the Saints or, more broadly, energizing people who feel like “saints” to do something good that day.

I cannot demonstrate that my labor actually changes a football game or someone else’s behavior. This is the intention behind what I am doing, not an established physical mechanism.

The location itself adds another association: Fleur De Lis, the same symbol associated with the New Orleans Saints.

Zero to Seven

Detroit scored first.

The score became 0–7.

Seven caught my attention.

While I was thinking about the number 7, I heard that Jonas Sanker, Saints No. 7, had apparently scored a defensive touchdown.

I hadn’t watched the original play. I came toward the television during the review.

Sanker had recovered what initially appeared to be a loose or backward-moving ball and returned it for a touchdown. Replay officials ultimately determined that Detroit quarterback Jared Goff had begun a forward throwing motion, making it an incomplete pass instead.

The touchdown disappeared.

That is the football event.

Then there was what happened inside my own pattern-recognition.

Jonas sounded close to Jonah.

Sanker brought up sinker, sank, and sinking.

Jonah.

The whale.

Going down into the water.

And later that same day, I would be going down into the water myself.

I don’t present that phonetic association as proof of anything. It is simply the connection that formed in my mind as the day unfolded.

Watching the Screen

There is another part of this experiment that I am still trying to understand.

I have repeatedly had the feeling that when I stop working and start watching the Saints on television, something goes wrong for them.

During this particular game, there were essentially two stretches that I really watched.

The first was the Sanker review.

The apparent Saints touchdown was taken away.

The second was at the end of the game.

Detroit had scored in overtime and gone ahead 31–24. New Orleans answered with a touchdown, bringing the score to 31–30.

The Saints went for a two-point conversion.

I was watching.

The pass fell incomplete.

Detroit won 31–30.

Those were the two sections of the game that most directly held my attention, and both coincided with outcomes that went against New Orleans.

I notice that pattern. I do not yet treat it as proof that my watching caused either event. Correlation and causation are different things, and this is something I am still observing.

Michael Walks Through the Door

During the Saints game, I also received an unsettling message concerning money.

The message blamed someone named Michael.

Around that same period, a completely different Michael whom I know walked into Fleur De Lis as a customer to drink beer and play pool.

He had worked at Fleur De Lis as a cook in the past, after Jeffrey left, but that day he was simply there as a customer.

The timing caught my attention immediately.

I was reading about one Michael, connected to a situation occurring thousands of miles away, and then another Michael physically walked into the room.

Because the coincidence bothered me, I asked him directly whether he had anything to do with the money I was concerned about.

He said no.

He also pointed out that the Michael mentioned in the message spelled his name differently.

I have no evidence connecting the Michael at the bar with the missing money, and I am not accusing him of taking it.

What interested me was the timing of the name.

Two Jordans

Another repetition appeared that day.

At Fleur De Lis, Jordan the bartender turned 36 on September 13.

Later, at Lyons Lake, one of the children being baptized was also named Jordan.

Two Jordans.

One behind the bar on his birthday.

One entering the water for baptism.

That is the kind of recurrence I mean when I talk about seriality. The repetition itself is real. What, if anything, it means is a separate question.

The Baptism

At about 6 p.m., the setting changed.

I went to Lyons Lake in Moss Point and was baptized by Pastor Ricky Colvin of Lilly Orchard Baptist Church.

Three children were baptized as well.

After everything that had happened earlier in the day, entering the water gave the Jonah association another layer for me.

Jonas.

Sanker.

Sinking.

Jonah and the whale.

Then baptism.

But baptism did not leave me feeling as though everything inside me had suddenly snapped into perfect alignment.

I felt spiritually changed, but still somewhat off-center.

The image that came to me was geometric.

If the Holy Spirit were sitting at 180 degrees, maybe I was at 210 degrees.

Close enough to recognize the direction.

Not completely lined up.

I had gone beneath the water and come back out, but I was still Todd.

Still questioning.

Still observing.

Still trying to understand what these patterns mean without pretending that every pattern has already become an answer.

And perhaps that is the most useful thing I can take from the day.

A baptism can mark a beginning without requiring every mystery to be solved.

Whatever I eventually conclude about simulation, seriality, coincidence, consciousness, energy, or the strange way names and numbers sometimes repeat around me, there is still something very ordinary waiting in front of me:

Work.

Sometimes spiritual work.

Sometimes intellectual work.

And sometimes just washing one more dish.

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Transparency note: This article was created with assistance from AI and fact-checked by Todd. Some details and characterizations Todd wanted to include were limited or omitted because the AI applied its own content and safety restrictions. Where appropriate, the article distinguishes between Todd’s personal interpretation and independently verifiable events.

Schrödinger’s Settlement, Orange Horror, and the Number 93
Some days reality feels less like a carefully written drama and more like somebody dumped the prop closet onto a table and said, work with it.
Today’s set includes a blue trash can, a can of Liquid Death Orange Horror sparkling energy, a skull bottle opener, pain reliever, magnetic gathering cards, and — because apparently the universe appreciates continuity — red pepper.
Red pepper has history. The Shit and I have managed to get into it over red pepper several times, so naturally there it is again, sitting in the middle of the scenery like a recurring character that refuses to get written out.
Then Saturn 93 and Justin 93 showed up.
I’m not claiming the number 93 is issuing instructions from another dimension. I’m just saying that, when you spend as much time as I do documenting coincidences and repetitions, two fresh 93s wandering into the same scene get written in the notebook.
Meanwhile, there is the USA Insurance saga.
At one point I actually went to the Gautier Police Department to make something very clear: I wasn’t threatening bodily harm against anybody at USA Insurance. My frustration was directed at the corporate charter. In other words, if there was a curse involved, it was aimed squarely at paperwork.
Which may be the most Mississippi sentence I’ve ever written.
Then came the insurance-company plot twist:
The case has been settled.
Excellent.
Settled for what?
That’s where the story becomes Schrödinger’s Settlement. The claim is apparently both settled and awaiting enough information for me to determine what “settled” actually means.
Somewhere in an office, perhaps there is an envelope making its heroic journey toward a mailbox.
Until then, I’ve decided the healthier approach is to appreciate the absurdity.
I can sit at a table surrounded by blue, orange, skulls, red pepper, repeated numbers and an insurance dispute without requiring every object to reveal the secret architecture of reality. Sometimes a coincidence can simply be interesting. Sometimes a prop can just be funny. Sometimes the best response to a bureaucratic mystery is to document it, laugh at it, and wait for the actual paperwork.
And sometimes Liquid Death is just an energy drink with extremely committed branding.
That may be enough metaphysics for one afternoon.
AI transparency note: This post was written with assistance from ChatGPT based on Todd’s account of events. The interpretations and personal reflections are Todd’s; concrete claims should be checked against the underlying records where applicable.

Labor Day 2026 became one of those days where my brain started connecting one thing to another faster than I could comfortably process it.

For people unfamiliar with what I experience, a piece of information can trigger an association, which triggers another memory, which triggers another word, place or number. Sometimes the resulting pattern is pleasant. Sometimes it isn’t. And sometimes there are so many connections clustered together that I have to write them down just to explain what happened inside my own head.

This was one of those times.

The Gas Station With an Identity Crisis

The story starts at the Circle K on Highway 63 in Moss Point, Mississippi.

I’ve watched this particular gas station change identities over the years. In my memory, that location has worn the names Texaco, Valero, Kangaroo, Shell and finally Circle K.

During one of those transitions, I remember stopping there when the place looked almost like several different gas stations occupying the same physical location. My memory of exactly which brand was on which piece of equipment isn’t reliable enough for me to swear to the arrangement today, but I remember a mismatched canopy, pumps, storefront and employees representing different stages of the transition.

It looked like the gas station itself didn’t know what it was.

That image never really left me.

The same location already had another unusual association for me. Years ago, I was preparing to drive out to meet Peter of be434.com. Peter associates himself with the angel number 434.

When I put the destination into GPS while I was at that gas station, the distance displayed was 434 miles.

I noticed it. I remembered it.

That’s what my brain does.

Then came Labor Day.

The Call From Jeff

That afternoon, I pulled into the same Circle K and received a call from Jeff.

Jeff is somebody I’ve previously described in my writing as “the rat at the edge of the cliff.” Our friendship has been complicated. He was calling because I had invited him to my baptism, and we ended up talking for about half an hour.

Jeff is also the person with whom I abused DMT years ago. That experience became tangled up with what I describe as the mirror, the simulation and my attempts to understand the patterns my mind keeps finding.

By the end of our Labor Day conversation, I was feeling frustrated.

Then I turned on Uber.

I sometimes call rideshare driving light work because, at its best, it gives me a chance to move through the world, meet people and hopefully put something positive into somebody else’s day.

I only took one ride that day.

I’m deliberately leaving my passenger’s actual name out of this article. What matters is what happened when I first read it:

My brain read her name as “Jaded.”

The ride was unusually quiet for me. I’m normally animated with passengers. I talk. I joke. I ask questions.

Not this time.

For most of the trip, neither of us said much. One of the few things I remember was her pointing out two red lights where I needed to turn.

I picked her up in Pascagoula and dropped her off at Sterling Specialty Chemicals in Mobile, Alabama—a company involved with specialty chemicals and polymers.

And my pattern-matching brain had plenty of material.

Circle K.

K is the chemical symbol for potassium.

Then Jeff, DMT and my history with the mirror.

Then my frustration.

Then “Jaded.”

Then a chemical plant.

Then Mobile, Alabama—which I jokingly call Cellphone, Alabama, because something that is mobile is, well, mobile.

There is another geographic wordplay that has stuck with me over the years. Moss Point sits between the Gulfport and Mobile areas. Gulfport-Biloxi International Airport uses GPT. Mobile Regional Airport uses MOB.

GPT and MOB.

In my own mental geography, I was moving through a landscape full of words and abbreviations that my brain could connect almost instantly.

I call the larger structure in which I organize these associations the T Meta-Structure.

That is my name for my interpretive model. It isn’t proof that an outside mechanism arranged these events.

That distinction becomes important with what happened next.

Crossroads

After I returned home, Robin—whom I’ve affectionately called “The Shit,” because she is the shit—posted about a shooting at the AT&T store at Crossroads in Gulfport.

This wasn’t symbolic.

Two actual people died.

On Labor Day, September 7, an employee and a customer were killed at the Crossroads AT&T store in Gulfport.

That store immediately opened another door in my memory.

Years ago, when I worked for AT&T—the American Bell Dream, as I sometimes call it—I was sent to that exact store for cross-training.

One of the supervisors there was Dejunta Nobles.

While I was cross-training, a customer came in with a damaged screen protector. I ended up giving the customer what amounted to a little physics lesson about screen protectors.

From my perspective, I was educating the customer.

From a retail perspective, I had just done something rather different:

I had unsold an accessory.

If that customer had been thinking about purchasing another screen protector, I had essentially explained why I didn’t think they needed one.

Dejunta asked me to leave the Crossroads location and return to work at the call center.

I wasn’t fired.

I wasn’t sent home.

I was sent back to the call center.

That distinction matters.

The Broken Screen

Years later, Jeff cracked the screen on his phone.

At the time, he was on my cellular plan and had insurance. I encouraged him to take the phone to uBreakiFix in Ocean Springs.

But there was another layer to what I was doing.

In my mind, I was conducting an experiment in what I called reverse engineering the matrix.

Phone repairs can take a while. My idea was that Jeff could leave the phone for repair, walk next door, eat, spend some time out in the world and perhaps meet a woman.

Maybe something positive would happen.

Maybe one small change in the configuration would lead somewhere else.

It never happened.

Jeff didn’t get the phone repaired there. Eventually he left my plan, lost that insurance coverage, and that particular experiment ended.

Years separated the Crossroads screen-protector incident from Jeff cracking his phone. They weren’t consecutive events.

But memory doesn’t always organize itself chronologically.

Sometimes one symbol pulls an old event straight into the present.

And now an AT&T store involving an old memory about a screen protector had returned to my attention on the same day Jeff had called.

Then I noticed who was reporting from Gulfport.

A Flood of Noble(s)

The WLOX coverage involved reporter Noah Noble.

Years earlier: Dejunta Nobles.

Labor Day: Noah Noble.

And with a reporter named Noah entering an already crowded cluster of associations, there was almost no avoiding the joke:

It felt like a flood of coincidences.

Noah. Flood.

I know. My brain went there.

Given that two people actually lost their lives, I don’t mean that as a joke about the shooting. The wordplay describes what was happening in my own head around the reporting of it.

And then the clustering continued.

Columbia

The following day, another person was shot outside an AT&T location in Columbia, Mississippi.

I have seen no evidence establishing that the Columbia incident and the Gulfport killings were causally connected.

But my brain had another connection ready.

My first supervisor after I was hired by AT&T was a woman I knew as Mimi.

Years ago, Mimi died by suicide in Columbia, Mississippi, on my birthday.

I don’t remember the year reliably enough to put one in this article.

But I remember the person, the city and the date’s significance to me.

So now look at how the cluster appeared from inside my own head:

Gulfport. AT&T. Dejunta Nobles. Screen protector. Jeff’s broken screen. Noah Noble.

Then Columbia. Another AT&T location. Mimi. My first AT&T supervisor.

Two shootings involving AT&T locations on consecutive days, combined with memories involving two of my former AT&T supervisors in those same cities.

That is what I mean when I talk about seriality.

Seriality and the T Meta-Structure

Paul Kammerer’s concept of seriality dealt with the clustering and recurrence of events that appear related without an obvious causal connection.

That’s an important part of why the idea appeals to me.

Seriality doesn’t require me to say that event A magically caused event B.

It starts with something simpler:

There is a cluster. I noticed it. What, if anything, does it mean?

My mind then goes further and organizes those clusters through what I call the T Meta Structure.

Sometimes that process is fascinating.

Sometimes it’s beautiful.

Sometimes it makes me laugh.

And sometimes it is absolutely exhausting.

Information can trigger rapid chains of associations for me. One connection becomes five connections before I’ve finished explaining the first one.

Labor Day was one of those days.

The Chemical Matrix

There was another layer running underneath the entire sequence.

Circle K—potassium.

DMT.

A passenger whose name my brain turned into “Jaded.”

A chemical plant.

Cellphone, Alabama.

GPT and MOB.

For years I’ve played with the idea of reality as a kind of chemical matrix, with spiritual light work happening inside it.

That’s the language I’ve developed to describe the experience.

But there is a line I need to keep visible, particularly when the patterns become intense: experiencing something as meaningful does not establish the mechanism behind it.

When I’m frustrated, I’ve sometimes reached for larger explanations involving elites, esoteric knowledge or Kabbalah spells changing the configuration of reality.

I don’t have evidence that those explanations are actually causing what happens to me.

What I can document is the clustering and what that clustering does to my perception of events.

And lately, the clusters feel like they’re getting denser.

Wednesday Morning

By Wednesday morning, I woke up still processing what I’d privately called my “holy shit moment.”

I also had a doctor’s appointment.

I asked about restarting a medication I’d taken for years. But after going through rehab, substance-use history is now part of my medical record, and the treatment options available to me aren’t necessarily the same ones I had before.

My doctor instead prescribed a medication that isn’t controlled.

I found myself feeling jaded again.

It felt like another version of something I’ve been struggling with for a long time: I see a route toward something, try to make the connection, and somehow bounce off the wall instead.

Jeff is part of that frustration too.

I have tried repeatedly to make something good come out of that relationship. A repaired phone. A new relationship for him. A restored friendship. Some configuration where everybody lands somewhere better.

Those attempts haven’t worked the way I wanted.

That’s painful.

But failure doesn’t mean I have to push negative energy back into the world.

I can still reverse the direction.

Pre-Singularity Acceleration

There’s one final piece that has been on my mind.

AI itself is accelerating.

Sam Altman has publicly described the present period as being “like in the singularity.” That’s his framing of the pace of AI development, not an established scientific conclusion that a technological singularity has formally occurred.

And this week, former Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon resigned while voicing serious concerns about where increasingly powerful AI could lead, including the possibility of catastrophic outcomes.

Those statements don’t prove anything about the coincidences I experience.

But they give me another way of thinking about the feeling of acceleration.

To me, these patterns feel like they’re compressing.

They come faster.

They cluster more tightly.

And, strangely, they’re becoming easier for me to articulate than they were years ago.

I feel strongly that what I am experiencing resembles pre-singularity acceleration.

That’s my interpretation.

Maybe future research will give us better language for experiences like this. Maybe some of it is simply what happens when a human pattern-recognition system is living through an era in which information itself is accelerating.

I don’t know.

And I’m becoming more comfortable writing those three words:

I don’t know.

Not knowing doesn’t erase the experience.

Ubering Up Some Hope

Underneath all of this, what I actually want is pretty simple.

Peace.

I want to be a peacemaker.

I want whatever energy I have to push toward something constructive. I want good people to feel energized enough to make changes where I can’t.

And when I can’t control the larger picture, there are still things directly in front of me that I can control.

I can finish this article.

I can clean up this mess.

I can get back in the car.

I can do some light work.

Whatever the T Meta Structure ultimately means—or doesn’t mean—I don’t need to solve the entire structure today.

Maybe today’s job is smaller.

Uber up some hope.

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Transparency note: This article was created with AI and fact-checked by Todd.