This is, perhaps, the freakiest coincidence in all my years of blogging.

1. This morning, before going out for my sunrise run, where I planned to continue listening to the audiobook of Jonathan Franzen's new novel "Crossroads," I opened up the NYT review, "Jonathan Franzen’s ‘Crossroads,’ a Mellow, ’70s-Era Heartbreaker That Starts a Trilogy." I wanted to read a review, and I selected that one, just because it's in the NYT (and written by Dwight Garner, a reviewer I like).

2. After the sunrise, with that tab sitting open on my browser, I sat down for my usual morning blogging session, and what caught my eye and set the tone for the morning was Donald Trump's participation in the tomahawk chop at the World Series game in Atlanta last night.

3. As I wrote in the previous post, that "jogged my thinking about gestures and chants that mimic the real or imagined traditions of indigenous people and I thought, remember drum circles?" That led me into a 1991 WaPo article about the men's movement 30 years ago, which entailed drumming and other "Native American" inspired rituals, much of which came from the musings of the poet Robert Bly. 

4. I click various windows out of my way and uncover that "Crossroads" review. It begins:

Jonathan Franzen’s new novel, “Crossroads,” is the first in a projected trilogy, which is reason to be wary. Good trilogies rarely announce themselves as such at the start. And the overarching title for the series, “A Key to All Mythologies,” may be a nod to “Middlemarch,” but it also sounds as if Franzen were channeling Joseph Campbell, or Robert Bly, or Tolkien, or Yes.

5. And don't even get me started on Joseph Campbell. That was so last week.

"We have not even to risk the adventure alone for the heroes of all time have gone before us. The labyrinth is thoroughly known... we have only to follow the thread of the hero path."

"And where we had thought to find an abomination, we shall find a God. And where we had thought to slay another, we shall slay ourselves. Where we had thought to travel outwards, we shall come to the center of our own existence. And where we had thought to be alone, we shall be with all the world.”

Wrote Joseph Campbell, in a popular "hero's path" quote that is printed on the wall of the Soho gallery showing "The Journey Home’ a Hunter Biden Solo Exhibition," visible in photographs at "Hunter Biden’s wife seen at SoHo gallery as controversial art show opens" (NY Post).

The gallery wall contained a quote from author Joseph Campbell’s book “The Hero with a Thousand Faces” about the hero’s adventure in mythology. Campbell, a literature professor at Sarah Lawrence College in Westchester, coined the phrase “Follow your bliss.”

Here's the Wikipedia entry on Campbell's famous book so you can refresh your memory of this thing you must have learned at one point in your life (I know I did, 50 years ago).  Campbell looked at the  stories of Osiris, Prometheus, the Buddha, Moses, Mohammed, and Jesus and decided that they were enough alike that they could be boiled down into what he called "the monomyth" (or "hero's journey"):