No, this is not a Dirty Harry perspective.
Are you the type of person who wins games of chance? Dice? Cards?
Do you feel like luck has played a big role in your life?
I have a relative who has only played the lottery once… and won the jackpot. No, I don’t have that kind of luck.
I am quite unlucky at games of chance especially at a Casino. It’s probably why I’m not a problem gambler like my grandfather was. I know the odds and my luck so I stay away from the siren song of easy money and bright lights.
Admittedly unlucky at love, but that’s something I’ve learned to live with.
As for other parts of luck in my life… well, I might be shit at hearts, dice and cards. I can say I’m lucky at where I work… Hmmm… nope, resigned, nope, they went bankrupt… uh, they tried to fire me and the owner got murdered… well, no.
Money? Have you seen my stock portfolio? LOL.
Lucky with meeting friends and working with good coworkers. Always have good people around me (the cokehead notwithstanding.) I’ve always been fortunate there.
We might not always agree, but I’ve enjoyed my time here on Deadsplinter and thank everyone (no, I’m not leaving or dying… just want to say thanks.)
There’s an old shaggy dog story about luck and odds which goes something like this….
A girl named Suzie lives in a little town in Kansas. At the beginning of senior year, on a Saturday night, she runs into Johnny, the handsome new guy in school. They start talking.
“Do you believe in fate?” Johnny asks. “We only know each other because we’re in the same English class, but there are ten different English classes I could have taken. That puts the odds of us meeting at 10-1. And then my dad just got a new job at the Ford dealership, almost out of the blue, that was a 1000-1 chance. And then I almost stayed in my old school to finish out my senior year there. Even going to this school was a 10-1 shot.”
“Yes” Suzie says “and when I was 12 I was almost in a car accident, and my parents said if the other car had been going 10 miles an hour faster, I wouldn’t have survived. And I know my parents were seriously thinking of sending me to religious school for high school, so it’s only a 50-50 chance I even would have gone to this school….”
Before long they come up with more and more longshot odds that stood in the way of them meeting, and before long they decided the odds were a billion to one against them even seeing each other. And so Suzie decided it must be fate, and went a lot farther with Johnny that night than she usually thought was right.
Johnny promised he’d meet her the next Saturday night.
The next Friday after school Suzie met her friend Nancy. They started talking about their plans for the weekend, and Nancy blurted out:
“You won’t believe this guy I met last Friday night” Nancy said. She went on “It was like fate. He told me how crazy it was we met — he almost didn’t go to our school, he almost didn’t take the same math class we’re in, and his dad only barely got a job at the Ford dealership. The more we started talking the more we realized the odds were a billion to one we’d get together, and so I guess last Friday night turned into a night I never expected. Anyway, he told me in math class today he’s coming over tonight…”
On the infinitely less cynical side of oddsmaking, there is The Man Who Planted Trees, a short story by Jean Giono with a great animated adaptation below.
It’s narrated by Christopher Plummer and follows a man who hikes in a barren region of France, who meets a shepherd. The shepherd gives him shelter and at night takes out a big sack of acorns. Out of all of them he selects just 100, and the next day plants them.
The shepherd guesses that of that fraction he has planted over the years, maybe 1/5 sprout, and of the ones that sprout, only half survive.
But over the years the story shows how that fraction of a fraction of fraction that beats the odds transforms the wasteland into a forest.
So there’s something in it about how patience flows past luck one way or the other.
i never win anything…..lottery…raffles…fucking bingo…. no dice
i am physically lucky tho….i walk away from things i really shouldnt
one time i hit a storm drain on a downhill on my bike with enough speed to clear the 6 ft fence next to the road….and asides from clearly knocking myself out..i was fine…just couldnt figure out how i cleared the fence when i woke
another time a forklift driver dropped a stack of pallets on me…. which…you know….was unpleasant…..driver was more in need of help than me tho
dude seriously thought he killed me and needed some time off
i cant complain about my luck i guess
In college I tried to climb up the side of my dorm and break into the window of a paranoid guy on my floor about 15-20 feet up to pull some pranks and teach him a lesson about suspecting the rest of us on his floor.
Now, nobody ever locked their windows. Why would they? Who ever climbed up the outside. How could he suspect us?
But this paranoid guy did lock his window. Probably because he knew, quite rightly, guys like me would try to break in and pull pranks. So as I yanked on the window, nothing gave. He had locked his window. I lost my grip and fell.
I remember looking down as I fell to earth “Oh no, I’m headed right toward that big pile of metal from all this way up.”
But fortunately I landed right right in the middle of a whole square of metal, with nothing but soft dirt underneath me. Didn’t manage to break into his room, but also didn’t hit a big pile of metal at 40 miles per hour.
I try not to press my luck. It mostly pays off.