Dark side of the fifties in Normal entries

Tomorrow is my birthday. I’m not concerned with hitting the dark end, the dusk, of my fifties. I don’t understand modern math so I don’t know what the fifties are the new anything. I think baby boomers made shit like that up, you know, seventies are the new forties type of shit, to keep from feeling ancient. In parts of the world the fifties are the new dead. I didn’t plan on living this long, but as long as I am, I might as well make a go of it.

There’s no reason any of y’all should remember this from OD days or proseboxs short but happy history, my birthdays are shrouded in bad luck; almost exclusively for me but you don’t want to stand too close. Too many “accidents”, lost things, damage to person and property for it to be coincidence. The other 363 days of the year I’m not superstitious at all, shit happens, for ill or good, most of it, as it applies to me, I have a hand in it happening. Not on the day of my birth. The only way I avoid such things is by hiding under the covers, though, that rarely works, I mean I can’t do that, so I just don’t take motorized vehicles anywhere and stay in the house. Even so … I’m extra careful going down stairs and with slippery showers.

Sunday is a good day to have a birthday on. Sundays in February are usually uneventful. I rarely had a problem getting my birthday off work and rarely needed to explain why. The one company that didn’t give me my birthday off had over a grand missing from the till and two TV’s mounted on a trellis thing, six of them had been up there without incident for a decade, fell. Fortunately, no one was hurt; the row of expensive video cameras below, however, destroyed. That was kind of a birthday miracle and, with the exception of having to walk to from work, that bad luck was kind of sweet. The company went out of business a few years later; probably birthday related.

My little sister is coming to town. Not for my birthday, that’s just a happy coincidence. If she were traveling on my birthday I’d be worried. She’s coming in this afternoon leaving Monday afternoon. Whew. I will either type a bunch of shit tomorrow or stay away from the computer altogether. Maybe just wear gloves. It seems like winter is almost over. Snow fall in march is more the rule around here than the exception. Global warming hasn’t affected that much, except, perhaps, almost insuring it. Global warming has very little to do with specific daily temps in specific geographic locations, but, much like the super-bowl, weather here seems to creep further into the spring yearly.

I’ve been here much longer than I expected to. I still think in Oregon terms though and snow is still a novelty. From 1980 to 2012 my birthdays didn’t have snow in my yard. Of course, three of the birthdays with the most damage happened in the nineties, including the “accident” that fucked up my back, neck, cracked teeth and led to other bad things. It wasn’t until that autumn that I was done with physical therapy. Most of the spring I walked with a cane. 1990, I was freshly thirty when that happened. It was my third birthday car “accident” the other two had totaled the cars but left me unscathed. That was the year I decided one day of superstition a year was a good idea.

I suppose I try not to walk under ladders, not a big fan of black cats, never understood what cracks in the sidewalk had to do with my mothers back, I’m not an agnostic because I’m hedging my bets and … well, most things like that have a practical or personal preference reason. Like ladders, usually someone is up them, sometimes with paint, walking underneath just seems like a bad idea. I’ve broken enough mirrors to have a lifetime of bad luck; on the whole my luck is pretty good, or it would be if I believed in luck; on the whole more positive things land in my lap than negative. That, too, might just be a matter of perception. By all rights, statistical, considering the sort of high risk situations I’ve been in, I should be a lot more fucked up than I am. I mean I’m not rich, but I’m mostly whole, the woman I’m most attracted to is attracted to me, it’s been a while since a missed a meal except when I wanted to, I’m not an alcoholic or drug addict which means if I want to get fucked up I can without fear of my entire world crumbling. I don’t think that’s luck, but it’s also not because I live right either. Another reason to be agnostic, but, the primary reason is that I’m absolutely certain I don’t understand much. There seems to be a pattern to this life, the cause of which I don’t know nor have I heard a plausible explanation.

Sure, strides in last hundred or so years in sciences have explained some patterns pretty fucking-A well, except for the pattern of human behavior which almost always when it finds a new way of improving life finds a new way of destroying it. Balance is hard fucking thing to explain. Sure, evolution and survival of the fittest explains how species balance out, but, although of immense importance to us, it’s just a small thing on one planet. My folks were professors. I grew up with the axiom – If you can’t explain it to a five-year-old, you don’t know it well enough. Clergy and physicists with genius IQ and PhD’s can’t manage to explain the universe in under a million words and some of those words are not in a five-year old’s vocabulary. None of them have even tried to explain my birthday. Though I’d accept both Bio-rhythms and Perhaps your soul didn’t want to be born as answers. Not good answers, but acceptable jumping off points. Bullshit, both of them, the pattern being way too narrow, but answers a five-year-old could understand.

Speaking of bullshit, I’m tired of this entry, I’m posting it as a reminder.