Tag: luck

Probably Not Smart

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Apparently random luck rules our lives to an extent that I think is hard to overemphasize.  Back two weeks ago I wrote about a tree that came down across my driveway.  After I finished cutting the top of the tree away, I took a big wrecking bar and rolled it to the side of the driveway.  For the last two weeks I’ve been planning to cut it up into smaller sections and put it aside.  But there it still is three quarters to the side of the lower driveway and one quarter on.  It looks awful and speaks volumes about my lack of organization and discipline.

But the funniest thing happened yesterday.  A guy was driving on the road by my house when something strange happened.  The shoe he was wearing on the foot that he used for working the brake and gas got tangled up with the gas pedal and he couldn’t get it free.  Somehow, he must have panicked and lost control of the steering while attempting to free his foot from the gas and he ended up turning onto my property close to where the driveway was.  He crashed through some small pines without even slowing down but the trunk of the downed tree was perfectly positioned to stop his car dead.  He wasn’t badly hurt and his car only sustained some damage where it hit the tree so it was able to back out of the debris once he got over the shock.  Looking at the line he was making through my yard the next stop was the bottom floor of my house.  That would have been bad.  That would have been a mess for both of us.

So, this is apropos of nothing.  It’s just kind of crazy how two random acts of fate can interact with each other to some almost purposeful end.  If that tree hadn’t fallen, he would have hit it square on and his car would have been totaled.  If I had cut it up as I had planned in a timely manner he would have landed in my house and we both would be having a very bad month.

It’s funny.  Even when I have bad luck it seems to turn into good luck for me.  For a long time, I’ve had this theory.  I feel like I’ve been borrowing good luck from an account and one day it’s all going to come due and I’m going to have a phenomenally bad day.  But maybe I’m wrong.  The exact mechanism of luck is not apparent to me.  And I think there are different kinds of luck.  For instance, I never win at games of chance.  I’ve never made a fortune investing in stocks.  All my luck runs to bad things not happening to me.  And almost all of my luck involves escaping the consequences of my own poor judgement; sometimes by mere fractions of a second or sixteenths of an inch.  And it’s been going on since I was a child.  And over the course of a lifetime, I’ve become convinced that there really is something called luck.  And some people actually have it significantly in their lives.

Anyway, it’s just something that seems to happen to me from time to time.  Maybe I really do have a guardian angel.  I guess it would be the height of ingratitude to ask him to let me hit the mega-millions just once.  Probably not smart.

Meanwhile Fifty Year Later

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Six down, one to go.  A fourteen-hour day just ended.  It went better than I expected.  It did end in failure and will have to be repeated in June but that’s a story for another day.  The main thing is I didn’t crash and burn in the middle and if I get through tomorrow, which will be easier than today, I can relax through my root canal or tooth extraction or whatever other dental horror story occurs on Thursday.

And I was completely isolated from the outside world today.  I don’t know whether aliens landed from the Andromeda galaxy and cured Joe Biden’s cancer and started flights of humans to their world based on a book whose title will eventually be translated to mean “To Serve Biden” (it’s a cookbook!).  I looked at the headlines tonight briefly and I couldn’t find anything of note but maybe I’m just tired.

While I was gone, I put Camera Girl in charge.  But the dogs know she is a pushover and they ran amok terrorizing her and just trampling her attempts to maintain order at the Compound.  It’s an old story.  She is acknowledged to be the world’s least effective dog owner.  She spoiled these dogs and now they neither fear no respect her.  I could restore order but what’s the use.  She refuses to discipline them in any meaningful way.  She just screams at them without any result.  But all of this is irrelevant.  Tomorrow is a day fraught with great significance.  Exactly fifty years ago tomorrow I first laid eyes on Camera Girl when she was just a seventeen-year-old babe at the beach in Brooklyn.

That day was an example of fate.  Neither of us was supposed to be at the beach that day.  And neither of us had ever met.  And just by the sheerest accident we each had a friend that knew each other and who had planned to meet at the beach.  So, by third hand luck we met and hit it off.  And now fifty years later we’re still keeping company and trying to figure out what the heck we’re going to do to keep this crazy merry-go-round twirling for a little while longer.

Fifty years is a considerable amount of time.  It’s basically my entire adult life.  The friend who knew her friend is long dead but still comes to mind from time to time because he may have been the funniest human being I’ve ever met.  I guess humor isn’t a good predictor of human success or even survival.  It is a very strange world we live in.  The unlikeliest chance can have a profound impact and steer the course of our whole life.

But all kinds of chance exist.  I had assumed we would celebrate our big day with some enjoyable event at our favorite restaurant.  But instead, I’ve got two chores to take care of and then I’m waiting on a root canal the next day that won’t let me enjoy food for a while.

What’s the expression?  You’ve got to take the good with the bad.  Well, that’s a crummy expression!  But also, very true.  Oh well.  It was a great day at the beach fifty years ago.  And there will be more great days to come.  So, on with the show.

The Story of Amasis and Polycrates (and photog)

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One of my frequent readers, Ed, said that my story of lucky laziness reminded him of Heinlein’s story of the man who was too lazy to fail.  Well, to give an alternate interpretation here is the story from Herodotus that informs my expectations for the future.

Back in the fifth century B.C., Polycrates conquered the Greek island of Samos.  He made a treaty with the Pharoah Amasis of Egypt and after they exchanged gifts they corresponded and became good friends.  Now Polycrates embarked on a career as a conqueror, bringing his navy of one hundred triremes to bear, he conquered many islands and plundered the mainland.  He eventually earned the reputation for being unbeatable and protected by fate.

Eventually Amasis heard the same rumors and became concerned for his friend.  He wrote and warned Polycrates that anyone who never had any misfortunes was marked by the gods for disaster.  He recommended that to avert disaster Polycrates should take his most prized possession and cast it away so that no one could ever find it again.  Amasis felt this would save Polycrates from his fate.

Polycrates took this advice seriously.  So, he took a ship out to the middle of the ocean off Samos and in view of his men he tossed his favorite possession, a seal ring, into the deep and then headed home terribly depressed by this loss.

“But on the fifth or sixth day from this it happened that a fisherman, who had taken a fine and great fish, and desired to make a gift of it to Polycrates, brought it to the door and said that he wished to see Polycrates. This being granted, he gave the fish, saying: [2] “O King, when I caught this fish, I thought best not to take it to market, although I am a man who lives by his hands, but it seemed to me worthy of you and your greatness; and so, I bring and offer it to you.”

And of course, the ring is in the fish.  Polycrates is ecstatic and afterwards writes Amasis to relate the amazing occurrence with the ring.  When Amasis reads the letter, he knows that Polycrates is doomed and not wishing to see a friend destroyed he writes back to Polycrates dissolving their friendship.  Years later the Persian satrap of Sardis, Oroetes had Polycrates ambushed and killed.

So that story seems to jibe with my idea of how crazy good luck works.  If you have nothing but good luck then at some point you’ve got to run out.  And then the bottom drops out.  Seems fair.  Besides, the first half of life is the most fun.  If you can have that without grief, I figure it’s reasonable to go over the falls in a barrel somewhere at the tail end without squawking about it.  Anyway, that’s my take on it now.  We’ll have to see if I can be so stoic about it when the rubber meets the road.

Now the funny thing about the story is that many years ago I was on a fishing trip with my father-in-law fishing for striped bass out on Long Island.  He was literally the Old Fisherman of the Sea but for the whole day we didn’t catch anything.  Skunked.  But right at the end of the day, far off, he sees a patch of water that’s boiling with activity.  He starts up the motor and shoots over to it and we start catching huge bluefish.  We catch so many we fill up the boat.  But suddenly I notice that my wedding ring is gone.  The blue fish slime is slippery stuff and the ring must have slipped off while were fishing.  Now my father-in-law was an expert on bluefish and he assured me that a flashing gold ring would have been snapped up by such a huge school of bluefish without a doubt.  So, he laughed at me and said it was up to me to come back someday and try to catch the fish that ate my ring.  And once again my luck holds up.  If a man loses his wedding ring there’s no better way to lose it than when in the company of his father-in-law.  It’s always been a good story ever since.

Years later when I read that story in Herodotus it struck me how lucky we didn’t find the ring in any of the fish we cleaned that day.  I might have ended up like Polycrates and Camera Girl would have been a very pretty widow.