Omens. Omens are what alarmingly superstitious people look for as they bounce eagerly from bad situation to bad situation. People who believe the old hokum about black cats and ladders invariably lay traps for themselves, only to be surprised when they fall into them, screaming in metaphorical agony. These are the people that don’t make jokes about Friday The 13th because they’re too busy wrapping themselves up in bubble wrap to protect them from the oncoming apocalypse of minor misfortune.
These people need us- the non-believers- to show them how good life can be away from omens, faeries, bad luck and fishwives’ tales. They need us to lampoon and mock the beliefs that they hold as fervently as an evangelical Christian holds onto a fading belief in a benevolent creator. We need to be out there, dancing jigs under ladders, crossing swords with black cats and breaking mirrors over the heads of Arch-Bishops.
We need to show people that you make your own luck and believing in omens and superstition will only lead you to dash yourself against the rocks of life! Unless they’re right of course. In which case, those of you who just threw your mobile phones at a mirror on my command might be in for a bit of a tough time.
The only evidence I can find which backs up the theory of ‘bad luck’ can be found in advertising. All the tales you’ve been told about the man who walked under a ladder only to have his house burn down at the same time are probably true but then again, he probably left the chip pan on while he went to clean his windows. All of these things are twisted and made into advertising gimmicks but what if there was one person who was the unluckiest person on earth. What would you turn their story into?
How do you twist the story of someone who is so monumentally unlucky that the cloud of bad fortune that hangs around them can be seen from Uranus’ orbit into something that can be enjoyed by all and sell a few of your shoddy wares in the process?
It’s easy!
Take Noah. He must be the unluckiest bastard in all of creation. Not only did he wake up one day to find that everyone on earth except him had been judged as unrighteous by bloody GOD himself, he was then forced to build an ark using only a flimsy set of IKEA instructions and an allan key. Does divine intervention and losing your local haberdasher to moral corruption qualify him as the unluckiest man in the world? No, probably not but having to fill his flat-pack boat with the world’s most dangerous creatures definitely bloody does.
The poor bastard was left to deal with the mountains of crap and carcasses left behind by the animals in his biblical supertanker without as much as a by your leave from the big bearded bastard in the sky. They’d have been eating each other, shitting all over one-another and generally making Noah’s life a living hell. So yes, he is the most unlucky person in history*.
Until now!
Advertising has jumped in and reminded us that while Noah may have been unlucky, at least his ark was fit for purpose. Unlike the poor git in the latest Lynx commercial.
You’re probably sitting there dumbfounded that I’ve managed to go through 600 words of a column about Lynx and not mention either the brand or the fact that it’s the sexist preserve of hormonal teenagers that have an innate desire to smell like vapourised cat vomit but that’s not the point! You all knew that anyway. I bet some of you occasionally walk past a group of teenage boys and make some flippant comment about the smell of Lynx and stale farts- and that’s okay.
Usually, I’d go for that angle as well but Friday 13th got me thinking about luck and how little luck this modern day Noah is having. There he is, given the task to build an ark and GOD hasn’t even given him any instructions, let alone the sacred Allan Key of Antioch that he gave Noah. He’s having to make it up with a rudimentary pencil carved out of the wood he’s being forced to work ON HIS OWN without the use of the flatpack Ark that Noah had.
It’s no wonder that he ends up with something that resembles an ocean-going pleasure yacht instead of a good, sturdy biblical ark.
The poor guy has done what any of us would do and modelled it on something he was familiar with. Will there be space for all the animals in there? Only time will tell. It’s not only that though, he’s clearly gone for comfort over substance with his tilled-wood interior and convenient fireman’s pole to allow him easy access between decks. He’s not leaving enough space to fit the animals in. No cages either. How will he keep the predators apart from their prey?!
I’m sure he has it all in hand. After all, this is GOD’s chosen man. The man who will lead all the creatures of this earth out of the darkness of the apocalypse and into a new world. A better world. A world populated by people descended from this brave but unlucky man. We should welcome the forthcoming apocalypse with open arms if this man is to make us better.
It’s no wonder he’s feeling a bit warm. He’s worked up one hell of a sweat working all that wood in time for the world ending. Having a spray of deodorant before the animals start to come isn’t going to make any difference, is it? Unfortunately for our plucky hero, all the shops had sold out of real anti-perspirant and he was forced to pick up a can of Lynx. Still, no matter. There will be no people to react to his smell of vapourised cat vomit where he’s going.
Here’s where our story comes to an end though, perhaps with the most unlucky element of all. It’s a well-known scientific fact that women cannot resist the smell of Lynx and will actively seek it out across continents if they have to. It’s not this man’s fault that he had to buy that can of Lynx. He’s going on to the birth of a new world, of course he needs some home comforts. Now his ark is suddenly full of beautiful women, attracted by the smell of his body tonic.
What is he supposed to do? Turn them away? The ark can very easily be converted to house people and the animals haven’t bothered to walk the lengths of themselves to join him. He tried to resurrect the world as we know it but was left with a giant wooden boat full of women that will eventually turn against him when ‘The Lynx Effect’ wears off and the can lies empty. He needed two of every animal but he didn’t get them. He failed GOD and when the waters subsided, he was left a broken shell of a man, completely ruined by his failure to create a new world.
The unluckiest person in the world stands, crestfallen, on the deck of that ark: make no mistake.
*Mythical history, that is. It’s a long-established fact that the unluckiest person in history is Adam Rickett.