soopageek

I'm not superstitious and don't believe in luck as supernatural force. Events which supposedly "bring bad luck" like broken mirrors, walking under ladders, or neglecting to toss the spilled grains of salt over your left shoulder into the eyes of the devil are absurd. Likewise, rituals or special objects don't "bring good luck" to a person. Luck is a phenomenon, though. It is the coincidental recurrence of events which we perceive to be fortuitous or unfortunate within some microcosm. A lucky person recognizes when the former is happening and exploits it. An unlucky person typically makes poor decisions with both. For the average person, the two balance each other out over a life time - something the Chinese observed as Yin Yang centuries ago.

I seem to have bad luck in the proximity of two particular cities in our country, both in the South. Both have struck me a blow in the past two weeks.

It was in Hattiesburg, MS nearly 6 years ago when the clutch went out on my truck. This ultimately resulted in a week of downtime. There were some silver-linings. I got to visit and photograph the New Orleans area 6-months post-Katrina. Also, I had only had the truck for a month, so I wasn't on the hook for the repairs. Bad luck in Hattiesburg struck again in September of 2011 when my company-owned truck broke down on Labor Day weekend. Due to the holiday and shortened business week, I was stuck in a motel room for 9 days on that one. Even more recently than that; remember my entry the other day about the painful experience of having an abscess drained? Guess where the hospital was where that was done.

This week, a new city is beginning to challenge Hattiesburg as my bad luck nexus. In March of 2010, while working as a flat-bed driver, I slipped and fell from the deck of the trailer and badly sprained my ankle in Prosperity, SC. I went to the hospital for this in nearby Columbia and was ultimately out of work for nearly a month. Now this week, I've been sitting in Columbia, SC in a motel room for two days waiting on my truck to be repaired. I was supposed to be home today, with the next four days off.

Thankfully, it seems to be resolving itself in a timely fashion. Assuming the truck is actually ready to roll this afternoon as I've been told, chances are I won't even be able to load onto anything and be Kentucky-bound until morning. Which means I won't even make it home until Saturday at the earliest. I can always extend my home time out the other side, but the whole point of taking my home-time on weekends is that I get to actually spend time with welfy, rather than her being at work all day and tied-up with play rehearsals in the evenings.

Here's to hoping the bad luck streaks in these cities are over.