Double Flee A

"The harder you work, the lucker you get."

I always thought Larry Bird said that, but when I thought about writing it here I looked it up and whaddya know, the internet says it's Gary Player. Larry Bird is the best basketball player who ever lived and I've heard he's my neighbor. I'll not prolong this confusing introduction and just move along with the story, which has to do with luck.

The reason for luck isn't easy to determine (but it's comforting to think it's deserved when it happens to us). We live in a vast nonlinear causality field, and that gives a lot of people a lot of problems. Mostly stupid people who want the world to be stupid like they are. But assuming I'm not one of them, which is debatable, I'm at least so accustomed to thinking the way they trained me to that I habitually find it strange that we live in a nonlinear causality field, and that luck is something worth mentioning. It'll be a different world once we shed the familiar notions in ways I'd never considered. This is fodder for another time which, like most times, will never come. (Which is also an interesting concept, but you see how this can easily become laboriously labyrinthine.)

[Technical terms follow. If you would like to skip this, go down to the paragraph that starts with BRING ON THE PUSSY AND THE LIQUOR. I'll try and tie in something about luck there, too, so as not to alienate you, my beloved audience.]

I got lucky today. I was tightening some microstella screws on a 2130 when I bottomed it out on the balance wheel and just spun as if free. I had torn the threads off and that equals bad with a capital b. So I moved it back out, tenuous purchase and all. A lack of friction to this degree is so close to horrible as to make no difference, and sometimes your body tells you how bad is what you've screwed up and done. My loupe fogged up the way it does when I'm suddenly upset, and there prevailed a powerful sense the world was mine to lose. It was about to be such a pity, nothing to be done but to purchase a new balance complete; admitting defeat and waiting for Rolex to send a tidy package that fixes everything and saves your sorry ass is never the preferred route for a purist. I drew it out about seventy clicks into position, and then the other side, and then the extremely improbable happened. As a sort of last glance back at the wreckage, I put the watch on the timer to see how it would come out, and the delta was six seconds. I checked again in six positions and I'll be damned if it wasn't like I'd never screwed up at all. I sped the watch up till it came out to about two ahead cumulative and then put it in the case like it belonged to Pandora. Some watches you're gladder than others to be done with. What this mean for that watch though, is that the next person to regulate it will discover that it takes very little trouble to move those. It may be me. Good luck to us all.

I'm going to be hung up on luck now, I can tell.

Forget the pussy and liquor thing. I can't think of a way to make that even close to as much fun as pussy and liquor. For those who skipped ahead only not to see the words I promised leading a paragraph and then had to attend watchmaking school to get to this point in the narrative, I'm sorry. Send me the bill and I'll pay your student loans. You can trust me, because I've kept my word every single time this has happened.

So I'd love to pat myself on the back and say that I got lucky because "that's just how good I am", or "that's how hard I work" or something I could feel great about, but it isn't that simple. In fact, no one has the faintest idea why events transpire the way they do. That astonishes me completely, the act of which fails to satisfy/makes me feel like a character in a cheap art house production about a guy who appreciates the world ho hum isn't that nice. Puke.

Tomorrow's another day off so it's back to the baby bath that is the gulf shore for poor me. I prefer the waves in the Atlantic. Also, there are far more awesome naked titties on south beach at spring break than there are here. Not that I'd trade my town for that one.

posted by dale @ 9:43 PM