I’ve said it before, but I consider it a personal failure whenever Big AL manages to string together two straight posts – much less three straight. I can’t even visit this site when I know there’s no updates and I haven’t replaced the standby post I keep in the emergency glass case for exactly such a time as this. I makes me sick. I mean, honestly this isn’t whinerack.com we’re talking about here – we aspire to be a bit better than that. (Not much though.)

I’ve been legitimately busy this last little while, but if anything, that would probably make a post more probable, since normally I’d try to hold off on the actual work by struggling to find every other possible thing to do before it. And I’ll be honest – that second Cereality article caught me a bit flat-footed – took the wind right out of me. It was hard to come back from a hit like that and just immediately go right back at it. Holy handbasket of hellfire…now that’s there’s actual documentation that The Philly Trip actually happened, I don’t know how to proceed. Up until this point, I had just assumed it was a collective hallucination we had while we spent 40 consecutive hours in the car in the Markville Mall parking lot while we licked brightly coloured poisonious South American tree frogs. Now we have to deal with the fact that those things actually happened. And I don’t know how to do that. Right now, I’m thinking of just repressing those memories all over again.

It’s always awkward here when nothing changes in over 48 hours – the tagboard stops and you’re left staring at the last comment there and if it’s yours, you’re probably wishing for someone else to say something to take the attention off it. The vibe in here is really great – it’s like daddy just hit mommy at the dinner table, and we’re all still trying to eat. “Mommy’s fine honey, just eat. Mommy’s fine – Daddy just got a little angry, that’s all.”

Ah, Dane Cook.

In case you haven’t realized it already, this is the “break glass in case of no updates” emergency post that I’m trying to hammer out on the fly right now. I’m going to ramble on for a bit about nothing and then I’m going to end it with an Ahnuld quote, and all will be back to normal. It’s really that easy.

Let’s talk about luck. Because I feel like I’ve been riding a minor good luck wave recently. And I know that even thinking about it and consciously acknowledging it’s existence – much less blogging about it – will blink it out of existence, but I’m okay with that. It’s not a huge wave. Have you ever been in a wave pool? The biggest waves are in the deep end, where they’re made. And by the time it reaches the other end, it’s pretty much gone. That’s the wave I had – the little pitiful tide-like thing at the shallow end. At no point was I filled with enough self confidence to be ready to pull some Ferris Bueller shenanigans – though as a youth my self esteem has been so completely shattered that I don’t think I’ll have a “I’m Keith Hernandez” moment in my entire life, even if I had a four leaf clover tattooed to my stomach. I wouldn’t be able to walk into Vegas and throw a chip on a random number and thirtyquintuple(?) my money, but betting red or black wouldn’t have been so bad.

If you asked me now, I don’t think I could remember specific instances of good luck during my supposed streak. But I felt good, and I guess that’s all it is. To be honest, even with all that said…I don’t really believe in luck. I might believe in bad luck, but only as a pathetic excuse to explain personal failure from time to time. I’ve always subscribed to the belief that luck is just something we’ve come up with in an impossible attempt to rationalize the randomness of the universe and the apparent meaningless of our lives. That’s what OAC Finite taught me when Mr. Esche broke my spirit and my dreams of winning the lottery, and although I remember some vague Chaos Theory mentions from when I read the Jurassic Park books, that’s pretty much my “worldview.”

That’s not to say I think believing in luck is silly. I’m a baseball fan, and baseball players are the most superstitious people on Earth. I’m not saying that it’s silly not to talk about a no-hitter, or that it’s silly that they always have to touch their cap before every pitch, or that it’s silly to keep lucky rabbit’s feet or whatever. Luck is confidence. And it doesn’t matter how you get that confidence, even if it’s not washing your uniform or growing a beard during a playoff run. Even I had lots of little routines during prehistoric times when I used to play in house league back in the hood, known to some people as “Markham.” Tap home base three times at the start of every at bat (right before grounding out to third 80% of the time). Punch the glove three times before every pitch (right before seeing the ball shoot right under my glove into left field). I never did it because I thought it was lucky, but your life is built upon your little routines and habits. The chair you always sit in at the dinner table, the first five things you once you wake up, eating every food group of your meal seperately in succession like a faggot…stuff like that. And sometimes when you don’t do those little things, you can’t get fully comfortable. And if you’re uncomfortable, you can’t be fully confident in what you can do. And maybe you slip up because you’re spending too much time thinking about it.

Or you can write it up to luck. In the end, it doesn’t really matter what idea you subscribe to or how you get there. Just find out whatever works for you and just do it.

That’s luck.

Now would be an appropriate time to end it with a luck-themed quote, but I can’t think of any right now, so I’m just going to go with my bread and butter – jumping roundhouse, crouching roundhouse, jumping roundhouse, crouching roundhouse! This one’s from everybody’s fourth or fifth favourite Ahnuld movie: True Lies.

“Is there anything you’d like to tell me before we start?”
“Yeah – I’m going to kill you pretty soon.”