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Quote of the Day – Enemy Action
Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. The third time it’s enemy action. – Auric Goldfinger, in the Ian Fleming novel, Goldfinger.
I am late today. It has been quite the week. I came back from visiting family in Dallas with a cold. Not a bad cold, but one that filled my lungs with goo making good sleep impossible. Most days I had four hours sleep. Last night I managed eight, but in four blocks of two hours each. Lack of sleep makes you stupid. Regardless, I still put in eight hours of each day at the day job. Working from home mostly, but working stupid.
On top of that, the change oil light came on during the drive back from Dallas and I ended up with nails in two tires. One could be patched, the other had to be replaced. Guess how I spent Saturday morning?
It’s been raining almost continuously in the Houston area this week. Besides making things miserable and dreary, it means the pavement is slick. Which (of course) means I found a particularly slick patch and took a fall. Scraped a knee and mildly sprained an ankle. I can get the shoe on, so it’s not that bad, but I am using a cane until the leg stops hurting and the rain stops.
To make things more fun, Internet connectivity has been playing hide-and-go-seek all week. I think it may be related to the rain, which is causing flooding. Including this morning. (It just came back.) For many, this is an inconvenience. For me, it is a disaster. I cannot work from home, or communicate with my editors to deliver articles and books or exchange proof revisions. I’m just glad I am old school enough to use a non-cloud version of Office, so I do not need the Internet to write. I felt like I was back in the 1990s, only without the dollar meal.
Human beings love patterns. They look for them in everything. Most of my career has been hunting patterns. (A lot of space navigation and engineering depends on detecting and interpreting patterns.) If I were a conspiracy theory type I suppose I would be looking for the pattern behind my ill luck this week. I should be hunting down the architect guiding my misfortune.
Except there is no architect, no conspiracy to Do Seawriter Wrong. It is just a bunch of unrelated (or at best loosely related) things all going wrong at nearly the same time. If you have been around long enough dicing with the universe there are going to be patches where you throw an inordinate amount of snake eyes and box cars in a short period of time. Since I have been around just shy of 70 years there have been more than one of these times. This is the latest.
In a way, an actual conspiracy is the more attractive option. I could take meaningful action. Turn into the ambush and counterattack out. Buy off the antagonist. Something. If it is just blind chance, or it the words of Earnest K. Gann “that some totally unrecognizable genie has once again unbuttoned his pants and urinated on the pillar of science” there is nothing you can do. That is why so many people find comfort in conspiracy theories.
As for me, I will just ride it out, keeping a course as straight and level as I can. Tomorrow’s book review might be late. Or not. We will see. Eventually, the bad times pass and after that? Laissez le bon temps rouler. They will eventually.
Published in Group Writing
Good points.
I find people would rather malicious forces be at work other than just happenings.
I like rain in Houston.
Don’t rule out a conspiracy from another level. Demonic harassment is a real thing.
Those jerks.
But yeah–sometimes it really is just a piece of metal in the road and your tire was the lucky winner.
And then there’s the final cause, the ultimate purpose. Only Heaven arranges that. A friend in grad school had the perfect answer one time. Why, I asked, did this excessively annoying thing happen to me?
“To further your sanctification.”
To quote Groucho Marx, “I like my cigar, too, but I take it out of my mouth now and then. It is not the rain. It is that it has not stopped over a two week period.
Kind of my thought. Certainly to teach humility which each of us need more than we are willing to admit.
Sometimes it ranged too much in Atlanta too.
Some days you eats the b’ar, and some days the b’ar eats you.
I, long ago, coined an alternative saying reflecting the same logic: “Fool you once, shame on them. Fool, you twice, shame on you. Fool you three times, stop lying about being fooled Joe Manchin!”
I’m at the age where everything seems to be conspiring against me.
one thing that might help is brazos walking sticks from Texas. They do make canes, but I love the wood in their different walking sticks. My favorite is the Ironwood – it gets lots of comments.
I am lucky that Mrs. Spring has allowed me to build up a collection without comment. Of course, not as many as her pairs of Hoka shoes, but I do know the rules.
get better soon.
Sometimes everything does go wrong. It’s been a while now. One day I ran into another member of the Porsche club and he asked how’s it going. Well I guess you should not burden others with your problems and just say great but I wasn’t in that mode. So I told him I was just recienty in the hospital with a bleeding ulcer. He then asked how’s the Porsche. Well, I told him that it was at the dealers because a valve floated and punched a hole in a piston, which is being replaced. Looking to change the conversation to maybe something positive he asked. How’s the wife? I told him that she left and is asking for a divorce. I could see he desperately wanted find something positive, so he asked how’s the Job. Well another strike. I told him I just left the office and that I was laid off. He just got a blank look on his face and slowly turned an walked away. I hadn’t even got the chance t tell him about the letter from the IRS! I told myself that I will look back on this conversation and laugh someday. but now is not that day!