whats up with bad luck?

Last weekend I was leaving on a trip to go back tot he west coast when I ran into the beginning of what I started to interpret as a string of bad luck. I don’t know if bad luck is real or not, because my circumstances could have been avoided had I played things out differently. But once the idea of bad luck starts creeping in to your mind, you can’t shake it. You start recalling every moment leading up to the present and identifying the small moments that were out of your control, that lead to your current demise. These moments start to outweigh the things you did have control over, they start to outweigh the things that were going right until all you can see is the ones that went wrong. Bad luck is the idea that bad things are happening to you over and over out of your control. It’s dependent on you noticing and acknowledging the luck, because without noticing it at first, it can’t develop. So after i miss my flight I started to wonder how did I get here? I was all packed, showered, and ready to wake up and go right to the airport, I was fully prepared and ready to go. Yeah I left a little late in a 5am sleepy daze but surely if any amount of these other blunders hadn’t occurred then I would have made my flight. If my uber driver hadn’t gone to the wrong terminal or the kiosks weren’t broken, surely I would have made it, I have made so many flights cutting it way closer than this. I don’t have time to go over all of my unfortunate events, but I will touch on a few. After some stressful back and forths with airline peeps, I decided to sit outside and smoke some weed that I luckily had with me. I had to wait 8 hours for my next flight so I figured at least I had this. After I find a good spot and cozy up, I remember that I smoked my last paper last night and I didn’t buy more because I decided I wouldn’t need any until I was in LA. Turns out I had an old pack of rogue papers in my camera bag that was touched, ever so sweetly, by some spilt coffee. Sweetly enough to stick all the papers together, which I ferociously picked away at like i was working on a relief sculpture, until I had two partial pieces of ripped something that somewhat resembled a rolling paper.

Later on once the flight was finally airborne, the snack cart guy fully skipped me. I was eagerly waiting and attentive to get ahold of some shitty almonds or pop chips and a seltzer water, and the homie rolled the cart right past me. I thought maybe he’s just doing a few at a time or something and I didn’t want to be a pain. So i waited and when I looked back again he was halfway down the plane. I still had hope but I looked back again later to see them in the back securing the snack cart. Yes, I could have spoked up still, easily, at this point, but I was in awe. My string of bad lucks have lead me to this moment, with this dude skipping me with the snack cart. The thought of that distracted me from wanting the snacks anymore. After all what was I really missing out on? But then I thought more, what if the almonds were actually nasty and I couldn’t really tell so I ate them anyway which contributed to chronic health problems down the road? So what if this bad luck was actually good luck in disguise keeping me from making a horrible mistake.

Suddenly I find myself running down the side of one of those weird airport highway roads near LAX in slides. I’m wearing my camera bag, and dragging my suitcase. I’m sweating and I’m reminded of my decision to quit wearing deodorant a couple months ago. I was on a shuttle that was dropping me off to wait for another shuttle to the rental car office. The second shuttle was showing no signs of coming so I decided to take matters into my own hands and run there instead of waiting. I finally make it there only to find out I don’t have enough available credit on my entry level credit card to pay for my second rental. ( I missed my first rental because of missing my first flight.). And not only that but, If I hadn’t randomly decided to pay for some stuff that didn’t have any business being on credit, I would have been totally fine. So I press on with the idea that maybe I was headed for some horrible accident in that rental, and everything up until this moment, including somehow the almonds, has saved me from getting into that rental. More good luck in disguise. At this point I’m calling my og LA homie Kris Chau to see if she can take me in for the night, because luckily Jon Choi is heading to Ventura in the morning and can give me a ride. Luckily again, she’s home and is down for me to crash. I was sweaty, stinky, tired, weedless, rentalless, and still unaware that I wouldn’t take a shower for another couple days. But as I’m writing this now I realize all of this goodluck that was happening to me simultaneously to the bad luck.

The whole trip was great actually, epic and timeless in itself, but thats a story for another post. There was still some bad lucks tossed in there, random and unexacting. Like this one night we were on a hype, Max and Aaron has just gotten clips after a decent soul crush and we were off to feast and celebrate. I get to the food spot and realize I didn’t have my Yashica anywhere, I must have left it at the spot which is super unusual for me. I be forgetting a lot of things but never my cameras. So Aaron takes me back and I run over and sure enough, theres my camera in the dirt with a footprint on it. Upon further examination I realize its Adidas tread on there, my footprint! Damn! I violated my own cam, thats some bad luck right there. Anyways, I’ve gone on enough about this and I’m sure if you’ve made it this far into my senseless rambling that you don’t have much more in you. So I’ll leave it there and leave you with this one question, that I don’t want an answer to but maybe at least you can consider; whats up with luck?