One of the stranger through-lines in my life is that I’ve had three completely random encounters with Billy Gibbons.
The first time, I spotted him walking along the median on Highway 111 in Rancho Mirage, just outside the Betty Ford Center. He looked so out of place that I genuinely thought he was a homeless man—which is almost unheard of in Rancho Mirage.
A few days later, I saw the same “homeless guy” at the mall. But this time, he was with a strikingly beautiful woman, and I remember thinking, Why is that guy hanging out with a supermodel? I edged a little closer with my baby in her stroller, took a better look—and realized it was Billy Gibbons.
He couldn’t have been nicer.
He was chatting easily with everyone around him, completely approachable. I even called my husband and told him to come down to the lower level to see for himself, but by the time he arrived, Billy had wandered off. I later spotted him browsing frames at LensCrafters and decided not to bother him again.
Casino Encounter
Then, a few years later, I pulled up to valet at the Agua Caliente Casino—and there he was again, stepping out of the car right in front of me. At that point, I had to say something. I told him we’d now randomly crossed paths three times, and he just laughed and was, once again, incredibly kind. He even gave me his card—which I’m sure he hands out all the time—but still, he took a moment to talk, and it felt genuine.
I decided at that point I had to ask him—why do I keep running into you?
I absolutely love his guitar playing, I love ZZ Top, and I’ve come to love this strange little thread in my life. It’s the kind of thing you start to look forward to, like a private joke the universe is in on. I fully expect it to happen again—and somehow, it always does.
And that’s where it gets interesting.
There’s a psychological explanation for this. Once something becomes meaningful to you, your brain flags it as important. It’s called selective attention—the same reason you suddenly see your car everywhere after you buy it. Your mind is constantly filtering millions of inputs, and once something is tagged as “relevant,” it starts surfacing it again and again. Not because it’s happening more, but because you’re tuned to it. Kind of like confirmation bias.
But that doesn’t quite explain this now does it? Yes, I like ZZ Top and I love Billy Gibbons, but I don’t give them much thought in my day-to-day life.
This is more like something looping back around in a way that’s a little too precise to dismiss entirely as confirmation bias. Red cars everywhere. Yes. Billy Gibbons everywhere? Not so much.
There’s also something called the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon—frequency illusion—where once you notice something, it seems to appear everywhere. But again, that explains repetition in awareness, not necessarily repetition in actual, physical, real-world encounters with the same person in completely different contexts.
So then you start drifting into the more metaphysical territory.
This stuff is more in line with the idea that we’re not just passive observers of reality, but participants in it.
That attention itself has a kind of gravitational pull. That what we’re emotionally engaged with—what we notice, what we appreciate, what we assign meaning to—has a way of circling back.
Not in a mystical, woo-woo way necessarily, but in a subtle alignment kind of way.
You move through the world slightly differently when something matters to you. I love music and guitars. I love the desert.
I go different places, at different times, with a slightly different awareness than most people who live very routine lives. I take trips that most people my age do not take. Trips I can’t afford to places I wanna go and it always works out.
And sometimes, those micro-adjustments create these strange intersections. Maybe?
Or maybe it’s simpler than that.
Maybe life just occasionally hands you a recurring character or a cameo that turns into a motif. A reminder that not everything has to be explained to be enjoyed. That cool things really can happen if you stay open.
Either way, I’ve stopped trying to solve it.
I just notice it, smile, and think—there he is again. Of course, Billy Gibbons is pulling his own luggage out of a limousine in front of my car at the valet at the Agua Caliente Casino in Rancho Mirage on a Tuesday night for no apparent reason. Yes, he performs here but he has a note scheduled to show here tonight. But there is.
And I have a feeling that somewhere down the line, I’ll be standing in line for coffee or pulling into another parking lot, and I’ll look up… and there he’ll be.
And to all of you die-hard ZZ Top fans, let me apologize in advance.
I realize I’ve somehow been assigned to a very specific timeline—one where Billy Gibbons keeps appearing like a recurring character in a simulation I didn’t know I signed up for.
At this point, we’re not talking about coincidence anymore. We’re getting into parallel universe overlap, light time-loop activity, maybe even a mild alien experiment just to see how many times two people can randomly cross paths before one of them says, “Okay, what is actually going on?”
That said, if anyone is currently living in a slightly different dimension where they keep having serendipitous run-ins with Lindsey Buckingham, I am very open to a clean, efficient universe swap. No paperwork. Immediate transfer.
I would also consider timelines featuring Jeff Lynne or Ringo Starr. I’m not unreasonable. I just want options.
Until then, I’ll remain here in my oddly consistent Billy Gibbons loop—watching for glitches in the matrix, checking parking lots, and waiting for the next crossover episode.
