Blast-Off Minus 10 Days

I, Byron Barnett, want to discuss luck.

What is it exactly?

Is it an energy?

Can you really get good luck from a rabbit’s foot? (Just remember: it didn’t work for the rabbit.)

Do people deserve whatever their luck is or is it random?

And will my forthcoming move to the Moon change my luck? 

What I mean is, do differences in gravity and sunlight have any effect on luck? Which it seems like they would if luck is an energy.

Incidentally, my luck often looks quite bad to the untrained eye—I have a tendency to break my bones and such. But usually there’s a twist.

Like when I broke my arm last year after I fell off a cliff in Question Mark Canyon. (It’s called Question Mark Canyon cause it’s long and narrow and curved at the top and has a big round boulder right at the bottom like a question mark’s dot.)

I had to get a fiberglass cast on my humerus. Your humerus is your arm bone, the one from your elbow up to your shoulder not the one from your elbow down to your hand.

Kids at school signed my cast. Teachers too.

My English teacher, Mr. Motesfont, wrote a quotation on it from the playright Will Shakespeare. He used a purple magic marker, so it stood out from all the other signatures. 

He wrote:

Byron—

This above all: to thine own self be true.

—Mr. Motesfont

I looked it up. It’s from that play called “Hamlet” about a ghost who comes back to haunt a castle. 

Here’s a famous picture of it:

The quotation that Mr. Motesfont referred to is highly thought-provoking. It means that no matter what else you do, you have to do what’s right for you, not just what everybody else is doing. Otherwise things won’t go your way.

Anyway, around the time I broke my arm I’d been thinking that patrolling the Eleven Deadly Realms was quite risky. Cause of all the unknowns. And if one night I just didn’t come back from one of The Deadlies and my mom called me on the intercom to come downstairs for dinner and I didn’t answer and she never heard from me again, she’d be pretty irritated.

So I’d almost made up my mind not to go on patrol anymore.

Then I looked down at the cast on my arm and I thought, “to mine own self be true, to mine own self be true.” And what could be truer to mineself than patrolling interdimensionally?

After all I am the Envoy Plenipotentiary to The Eleven Deadly Realms, not to mention the Nomad in the Ninth Dimension. And I love my work.

So I went. But unfortunately that night when I popped over to the Third Deadly Realm I materialized right in the middle of a hungry horde of space-vermin.

There were so many of ‘em, I’m pretty sure they could’ve devoured me. It was the biggest horde I’d ever seen, six or seven times the normal size. Way too many for me to fight off as per ordinarily.

The Main Vermin (that’s what I call a horde’s leader) zipped forward to take the first bite of me.

I jerked up my casted arm in a kind of reflex to protect myself and he bit down on it with full jaw-power ...

… and broke off all his teeth!!!

Normally a space-vermin’s teeth, which are somewhat like the teeth of a piranha fish’s, somewhat like the fangs of Dracula, can cut right through you. But my fiberglass cast was too hard!

The whole horde saw what happened. The Main Vermin’s teeth all broke off and his gums started gushing green vermin-blood.

It scared the rest of the horde so bad they turned around and bolted.

I was in the clear. I did my patrol and made it home with enough time to wash my hands and comb my hair before mom called me down to dinner. 

But if I’d never’ve fell in Question Mark Canyon and broken my arm, I’d never’ve gotten my cast. 

And if I’d never’ve gotten my cast, I’d’ve been eaten by space-vermin. 

Let’s see how my luck works on the Moon.

More soon,
Boon