{"id":33501,"date":"2025-06-09T05:00:23","date_gmt":"2025-06-09T09:00:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/orionscoldfire.com\/?p=33501"},"modified":"2025-06-08T22:17:37","modified_gmt":"2025-06-09T02:17:37","slug":"probably-not-smart","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/orionscoldfire.com\/index.php\/2025\/06\/09\/probably-not-smart\/","title":{"rendered":"Probably Not Smart"},"content":{"rendered":"

Apparently random luck rules our lives to an extent that I think is hard to overemphasize.\u00a0 Back two weeks ago I wrote about a tree that came down across my driveway<\/a>.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 For the last two weeks I\u2019ve been planning to cut it up into smaller sections and put it aside.\u00a0 But there it still is three quarters to the side of the lower driveway and one quarter on.\u00a0 It looks awful and speaks volumes about my lack of organization and discipline.<\/p>\n

But the funniest thing happened yesterday.\u00a0 A guy was driving on the road by my house when something strange happened.\u00a0 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\u2019t get it free.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 He wasn\u2019t 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.\u00a0 Looking at the line he was making through my yard the next stop was the bottom floor of my house.\u00a0 That would have been bad.\u00a0 That would have been a mess for both of us.<\/p>\n

So, this is apropos of nothing.\u00a0 It\u2019s just kind of crazy how two random acts of fate can interact with each other to some almost purposeful end.\u00a0 If that tree hadn\u2019t fallen, he would have hit it square on and his car would have been totaled.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s funny.\u00a0 Even when I have bad luck it seems to turn into good luck for me.\u00a0 For a long time, I\u2019ve had this theory.\u00a0 I feel like I\u2019ve been borrowing good luck from an account and one day it\u2019s all going to come due and I\u2019m going to have a phenomenally bad day.\u00a0 But maybe I\u2019m wrong.\u00a0 The exact mechanism of luck is not apparent to me.\u00a0 And I think there are different kinds of luck.\u00a0 For instance, I never win at games of chance.\u00a0 I\u2019ve never made a fortune investing in stocks.\u00a0 All my luck runs to bad things not happening to me.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 And it\u2019s been going on since I was a child.\u00a0 And over the course of a lifetime, I\u2019ve become convinced that there really is something called luck.\u00a0 And some people actually have it significantly in their lives.<\/p>\n

Anyway, it\u2019s just something that seems to happen to me from time to time.\u00a0 Maybe I really do have a guardian angel.\u00a0 I guess it would be the height of ingratitude to ask him to let me hit the mega-millions just once.\u00a0 Probably not smart.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Apparently random luck rules our lives to an extent that I think is hard to overemphasize.\u00a0 Back two weeks ago I wrote about a tree<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[5,3366,818,1263],"tags":[3341,3607],"class_list":["post-33501","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-current-events","category-life-in-dunwich","category-ocf","category-stuff-that-personally-interests-me-miscellaneous","tag-dunwich","tag-luck"],"yoast_head":"\nProbably Not Smart - Orion's Cold Fire<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/orionscoldfire.com\/index.php\/2025\/06\/09\/probably-not-smart\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Probably Not Smart - 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