Yeah, so it’s Friday the 13th … so what?!

I’m not really one to get all up in arms about today being the unluckiest day of the year. Heck, I even flew today on Friday the 13th, which in my opinion shows an extremely impressive amount of the exact opposite after not only being launched into the air at 175 mph and then subsequently landing several hours later in the general vicinity of my destination, but also simply by being able to endure yet another excruciating experience with the ever-talented men and women of our Transportation Security Administration, keeping our friendly skies free of those deadly liquids, gels, and aerosols that we all use to cleanse ourselves with each morning! Thank God that lady in front of me was required to take her shoes off at the security checkpoint – otherwise that nasty foot odor she was breeding inside of those cloddy beasts she called shoes might very well have manifested into an unreconcilable force that even that fancy, air-poofer machine of theirs couldn’t have resolved…

But it’s ok – I’m safely on the ground now, sheltered in a second-floor room in this lovely hotel smack dab in the middle of BFE, New York. Chances are if a black cat dared even come near my path, something with much larger teeth would just jump out of the woodwork and take the thing out before it could even think about giving me seven years of bad luck! Or is it thirteen? I get kind of confused when it comes to the durations of relative misery that are associated with each superstitious scenario … break a mirror – 13 years of bad luck; walk under a ladder – 22 years of bad luck, plus the chance that you might get covered in paint if you manage to knock over said ladder and the paint can resting on top of it in the process; step on a crack – forget about it! I just hope you bought your mother a nice bouquet of flowers last month when the time was right because boy, is she gonna be pissed at you now…

Just between you and me, though, sometimes I wonder if Friday the 13th is really just a day manufactured by klutzy people to give themselves false hope that at least a couple days out of the year, there’s a chance that somebody else will be more unlucky than they are, kind of like Valentine’s Day being concocted by lonely women who dream of receiving flowers and chocolates from someone other than themselves every once in a while. I’m pretty sure that there isn’t a room full of black cats and guys carrying ladders and mirrors just waiting for today to make their move and unleash their misfortune upon us all! Besides, what would they all do to pass the time the rest of the year? I mean, they could lend a hand delivering all of those flowers and chocolates on Valentine’s Day, but that still leaves an awful lot of ladder and mirror enthusiasts and their cats with way too much free time on their hands…

I say if you’re going to go around just making up days to put on the calendar, why not pick something that all of us can really benefit from?! Like Maybe You’ll Get Some Friday, when just the exact opposite of bad luck happens to random strangers and suddenly crossing a black cat could be the best thing that ever happened to you! Or even on a less sexual note, perhaps The Pumps are Broken So Have as Much Gas as You Want for Free Tuesdays – some SUV drivers might even argue that they’d prefer that to the first idea, although in my opinion, as far as I’m concerned the day Americans are turning down sex in favor of gasoline is the day that the terrorists truly have won.

although on the other hand, maybe we just came up with something that all of our ladder and mirror friends (and their black cats) can do during the off season – fight terrorism! We just deploy our army of misfortune into areas that are known to harbor terrorists, then just sit back and let our superstitions stay the course for us. That said, I suppose we’ll just have to hope that within those seven years, the terrorists will have given up on terror in favor of, oh say, macrame or basket weaving or something…

Or is it eleven years???