Sometimes it seems like the bad things that happen to me have a secret club. A place where they all meet and coordinate.
“We’ll hit her all at once,” they say. “A massive combo attack. Pow pow pow.”
They synchronize their watches. Decide on a time and place for a future rendezvous. And when the time is right, all the bad things happen to me. Pretty much at once.
It’s frankly uncanny. It isn’t like the bad things are nonstop. Nothing as tidy as that. I do have some stretches of time where things go well for a bit. Things feel stable.
But then pow. And pow. And pow pow pow. It’s usually never one bad thing that happens but seven.
“Well, surely, Page,” you might be saying, “these bad things are all related. That’s why they’re all happening at once.”
You would think so, wouldn’t you? And if I weren’t the one living through it, I’d probably guess that myself. It’s the horse after all, not the zebra.
But no. A flurry of unrelated, seemingly random things happening independently all land upon me at the same time. The furnace going out at the same time a relative dies (of causes unrelated to the furnace). And another four or five things. Just like that.
There have been times when things were already difficult, when I was already in a terrible mood because something unfortunate had happened when the next one happened and then the next and so on — and I’ve stopped myself, reeling from the surreal feeling of so many things going wrong, and I’ve said, “Well, at least it didn’t ruin a good mood.”
Which is something, you know? It doesn’t fix any of the problems, that’s for sure. But it’s a very good point. And usually good for a laugh, at times when those are otherwise hard to come by.