Lucky strike

Unreasonable choices

If the last new moon was an interstitial day, a day in which time merely passed on the way from one place to another, today is its astrological opposite. Today is a day in which everything matters. What you wear, who you talk to, and about what, who shows up at your door, what you eat, what you’re wearing, how you pass time. Your choices, or your performance of them, all have consequences.

Years ago I was visiting a successful scientist slash crypto influencer friend at his ultra-modern pod in Williamsburg. He’s originally from India, and he described his parents coming to visit when he first moved in. It was late, he was hungry, but they wouldn’t leave until they had boiled milk to ensure prosperity. “You both have PhDs!” he shouted at them.

Last night, like every eve of every lunar new year, I was feverishly cleaning my apartment. The motivation was triple: Rid the place of bad (old) luck (dust); make the apartment passable for guests the next day; don’t disappoint my mother or Buddha or our ancestors. These are clearly not in line with my goals the other 364 days of the year, which are more like, “stay calm” and “don’t look stupid” and occasionally “write something good.”

I was unusually bent on completing my new year’s tasks, because it was about to be the start of a dragon year. And as the result of being raised by two medium superstitious Vietnamese people, and growing up with a best friend raised by a medium superstitious Taiwanese mother, it has been imprinted upon me that going to bed on the eve of your zodiac year unarmed is inviting car accidents, bad haircuts, bad knees, heartbreak, death. As a generally lucky dragon, I had taken every precaution to protect against a bad luck year.

While I was vacuuming in the kitchen I heard something thunk to the ground. A sakura stem I had gotten to mimic the peach blossoms that are popular for Tết in Vietnam, had fallen in its glass, and there was water everywhere. I picked up a nice new notebook I had been devotedly writing in every day. It had come with an ugly vinyl cover, which I had taken off as soon as I had gotten it and abandoned somewhere. The notebook is designed to last five years, and one month in, moisture was spreading across its unprotected pages. I quickly wiped it down. I picked up a second book, a hardcover novel in Japanese I was reading for work — actually it was too hard and I hadn’t admitted to myself yet that I had quit — which still had its ugly paper book cover on from the store. It was puckered and soggy. I ripped it off and threw it into the recycling. The book, underneath, was untouched. Japanese fastidiousness: 1. Dragon pride: -1,000.

I knelt to look at the damage to my “bookshelf,” a space on a bag rack that came with this furnished apartment. I wiped water from Octavio Paz, DT Suzuki, Barthes, Simone de Beauvoir. Sorry guys. Wipe wipe wipe. Against Everything, The Intimate Resistance, Confessions. Poor friends. Wipe wipe wipe wipe wipe wipe. As I pulled volumes one after the other searching for damage, I imagined the director of the scene trying to show with a few shots the question as I heard it: Had dragon year’s terrible luck already started? Or had the rushed and unreasonable attempt to avoid bad luck at all costs set into motion a chain of events that had led to my own misfortune? 

I pulled Philip Larkin from the shelf and swiped away at the moisture sitting on the shiny back cover. The book flopped open to my favorite poem by him, “As Bad as a Mile”:

Watching the shied core
Striking the basket, skidding across the floor,
Shows less and less of luck, and more and more

Of failure spreading back up the arm
Earlier and earlier, the unraised hand calm,
The apple unbitten in the palm.

When I first read it in college I read it over and over, thinking about how bad I was at throwing things into baskets, how my arm seemed pre-loaded with failure.

Here I stand on new year’s day, not yet in motion, full of potential energy. My arm is calm, unraised by my side. Is it fated to fail? Or do these arms come pre-loaded with something else? I toss the ¥100 coin into the offerings box and then put my hand into the wooden hole, plunging it into an eddy of white and red fortunes. Swish swish swish, pinch. Pull.