My luck has been hit and miss today. On the negative side I made a couple of pretty bad mistakes at work (I’m a brain surgeon) and got chewed out by my boss and several asshole lawyers, but that was balanced out by the fact that I was practicing medicine under a false identity anyway, and I can always just “disappear” again like last time. Maybe I’ll be a pediatrician next—I do like the kids.

Another bad thing that happened to me today was I left my keys and cellphone at the gym. It’s a private gym, so you can’t just walk in, you need a key, but I had left mine inside (see last sentence) and thus was locked out. I stood outside for almost an hour asking people if they would let me use their key to get in, but everybody told me they were too busy to help out. During this time my feeling of solidarity with my fellow man, long-fostered by McDonald’s commercials and the reassuring voice of Paul Harvey, became dessicated and crumbled into my blood stream, clogging all of my chakra points and leaving me an empty shell that can never experience oneness with the universe or probably even the kama sutra. I am not sure how that stuff works. Anyway I can’t feel emotions anymore and I’m sleepy like, all the time.

Eventually, someone finally let me in.

A good thing that happened to me today was that a guy I know at the convenience store gave me a lot of free food. One entire shopping bag full of Fritos, and one full of Ho-Hos, Hostess Fruit Pies, Cookies and Donuts. I said, “what am I going to do with all this junk,” and then, as I was walking home, I saw an old man pushing a cart along the street. He was stooped over and wearing tattered clothing, and it looked like everything he owned was in that cart. He looked so hungry and miserable, I realized that here I was complaining about having two bags full of food that I didn’t even need, and that man in front of me would give anything just to have a single bite of food.

So I said to myself, “this man is dangerous, don’t underestimate him.”

And I ran, I ran home as fast as I could, and I locked my food in the closet and heaved all my furniture in front of the door. I lay there panting on the floor after the effort, and I started to think about luck.

What is luck, I asked, is it being born under the right star? Is it closing your hands and hoping something good befalls you, or is it being ready to seize an opportunity when it comes along? Is luck winning $3500 from your friends in a poker game when they are drunk enough to be taken advantage of, or is luck just having friends to begin with?

I’ve had a lot of things happen to me, some of them good, some of them bad, but when I look back on my life one thing is clear: luck is an illusory phenomenon caused by the fallacious anthropomorphization of a universe which is fundamentally insensate and meaningless, just like grandpa always used to say.