Friday Thirteen come on Friday this month (to quote Mr. Churchill LaFemme)

-->

Friday the thirteenth. I'll start writing here about bad luck.

It's bad luck to move to a green place. Where do you think all that green comes from? It's because it rains and rains and rains and rains and rains and rains and rains and rains. Move here and it's seven years of rain.

Bad luck comes in sevens. Dwarves are very bad luck. Days of the week, too. If something bad happens, chances are it will be on some day of the week.

It's bad luck to walk into a car backwards. Bad luck to walk into anything backwards. You could hurt yourself.

One of my imaginary friends doesn’t believe in good-luck charms:

"If it works, it's not luck."

"What do you mean?"

"If something good happens because you're carrying a monkey head, or whatever, it's not good luck."

"Sure it is."

"Uh-uh. It's not any kind of luck at all. The good thing happened because you had your dried monkey head."

"Yeah, good luck."

"No, cause and effect. The monkey head caused you to find a quarter on the sidewalk. If there's a cause, it's not luck."

"What are you, some kind of determinist?"

"You're the determinist. Thinking that a monkey head can affect where the molecules go."

Maybe the good-luck charms are really anti-bad-luck charms. But there's conservation of luck. Didn't you know? If the bad luck doesn't happen to you, it lands on someone else. If you don't step on a crack, you'll break some other kid's mother's back. It all has to balance, add up in the big accounting book.

That's the reason some people have such awful luck. Everyone around them is loaded up with rabbits' feet and St. Christopher medals, and so the bad luck has nowhere to go but onto the poor bastard who hangs around with them.

So what you have to do is take your lumps, suffer the bad luck for the good of society, so no one person gets too much of it.

Or maybe it works this way: rabbits' feet absorb good luck. Down in that soft fur between the toes, by the little claws. You need one from a young rabbit, unfortunately. The older ones have spent too much time walking around, sucking up bad luck from the ground into their feet.

Bad luck soaks into the ground. Flows downhill. Collects in sidewalk cracks.

Anyway, the rabbit's foot soaks up all the bad luck that was headed your way. Eventually it fills up, an you have to get rid of it at the hazmat site. If you just toss it in the trash, it could break open.

Eric's brother Todd tossed a rabbit's foot in the trash. He didn't know. Went into the garbage truck, and when the truck hit a bump there was a broken mirror inside that sliced the rabbit's foot right in half. All the bad luck came spraying out, the garbage truck lost control, spun into a bus full of nuns and schoolchildren, the bus ran up the sidewalk and through the door of the warehouse where the electronic voting machines were kept, smashed the breaker box in a shower of sparks, sent a power surge into the machines that were all plugged in getting their batteries charged up, and Trump got elected. Four years in the hard luck house.

My grandmother saw a guy on TV who had been struck by lightning four times. Once it knocked his hat off. Once it welded the zipper shut on his jeans. Once it curled his hair. Once it turned all his fingernails and toenails black, and they all fell out a month later. The interviewer asked him, "So you've been struck by lightning four times! Four times, and you lived to tell the tale. How do you explain that?"

 "Just lucky, I guess," said the guy.