There's something to this collective consciousness thing

Today the lede story on my metro front was about Eudora Baptist Church being on the verge of partial demolition and renovation (I'll link when we go live). And, as my mind is pretty much a rickety hamster wheel that keeps turning even when no rodents are running on it, throughout the night the words "Eudora Welty" flickered in my head even though Eudora Baptist has nothing to do with Welty, the writer.

So at around 8 p.m., long after the Eudora Baptist story had been put on the page and edited, I got a message from the wire editor that he was stringing some Mid-South briefs from wire stories, and that if I needed a mugshot for them, I could use Eudora Welty, because there was an item in the briefs about some color video footage of Welty being found and returned to Mississippi.

This is weird for lots of reasons:

I hadn't even looked at the wire or any local news sites tonight, so there's no way that I would have seen the item even peripherally.

Wire brief items don't make it onto our budgets, so I wouldn't have seen the name that way either.

I'm not even all that familiar with Eudora Welty or her writing, so to have her on my mind is just sort of random.

So, seeing "Eudora" in the church story while laying it out made me think of "Eudora Welty" for no reason other than she just popped into my head. Seriously, I felt it pop. Suddenly I was like, "Eudora Welty. ... Whoa, why did I just think of Eudora Welty?" And then nearly four hours later, a news item popped up about Eudora Welty.

So weird.