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.