Things happen in threes. This is the wisdom behind breathless reporting of celebrity deaths, and other unabashed holdovers of strange superstitious atavism persisting in our iPhone world.
Those closest to me readily reminded me of this “things come in threes” rule recently. But this was only after my car was smashed like an accordion out from under me, my chimney showed more gaseous blowback than a congressman’s gullet, and a dog mangled my hand, necessitating a series of rabies shots.
That was the last two weeks of 2018: somewhere upwards of $25,000 in survival fees. Happy Fucking New Year .
The string of these events is never quite so severe for me – I generally get a few setbacks, a bank overdraft here, a toddler tantrum there, a mechanic’s bill. Things break in the house, they take months to get fixed, and there are little falls and scrapes. I bang my head on the low pipes in my old house’s basement for the 547th time (yes, I have kept count since 2013). Spills happen, things fall apart gradually. Life moves on, inexorably. We carry on, the pessimists among us gnashing teeth, the optimists shrugging and looking on the bright side.
But this felt like the universe was out to get me. Because the circumstances seemed just too arch to be random chance.
The accident was as I was waiting to make a left turn – into my mechanic’s place to pick up my wife’s car. (My wife got the new car, I am getting the ancient Civic with 225,000 miles).
The chimney is something my mother-in-law had assured us was a ticking time bomb of fiery death – to which I had skeptically replied by making an appointment with a local sweep. Turns out it’s a potential killer.
And the dog at the dog park – smaller than my pitbull, which it attacked, mind you – had the same moniker as my nickname from high school. Hands red with blood, I asked the strangers if their dog was up to date on shots – but it was only when I got home that I realized a stranger’s word is probably not good enough when it comes to a foaming, brain-melting, agonizing death.
Bad Juju, is what I call all this. It’s a term my wife is exasperated by – because she knows when I have deemed such a day thus, she knows it’s batten-down-the-hatches, every-man-for-himself race to an early bedtime.
The December 2018 run of luck has had me making a beeline home from work every day, carefully watching the skies for the lightning bolt with my name on it.
I’m exaggerating, a bit. But only partially. Because there is a series of patterns as “we get through this thing called life,” as Prince once sermonized. These coincidences have to have you believing that there is some kind of intelligent force out there pulling the strings on every single quark and muon and neutrino in the universe. It also has to make you think the intelligence force out there, be it God or the Devil, has a really fucked up sense of humor.
But as this Annus Mirabilis 2019 has kicked off, and tonight I enter my 37th year this very night, I have come to understand that even if you continually roll snake eyes out there, eventually the spell must be broken. You have to get a three somewhere in there, once in a while.
Unless the dice are shaved, of course. That’s a whole other matter entirely.