Fat Tuesday and the Not Unlucky Die Charm

I love bar drinking on weeknights. Drink specials and friendly lonely drunks all come out on work nights. Every weeknight is someone's service industry weekend. It provides both the freedom to be a quite isolated drunk and to politely interact with other misanthropists. But my freedom provided by my parents issues with organized religion becomes my curse once a year, when I inevitably and mistakenly wander out on Fat Tuesday.

It was one such accidental evening that I was given a gift. This wasn't a unique gift at any sort of first glance. It was one more string of plastic beads. But this particular strand caught my eye. It reflected the light at inconsistent angles in a way no string of round beads could. A strand of glittering cubes, each rotating independently reflects light in such unpredictable and attractive angles that no disco ball can compete with. Given the option of two by an overly friendly bartender, I picked the seemingly random glittering string of silver cubes over the boring standard necklace of linked green spheres.

The necklace was a string of dice all numbered two to five. The string holding the necklace together ran through every die's one and six side. My D&D knowledge saw it as an “okay luck charm.” It was neither capable of a critical success nor a critical failure. All outcomes with this necklace would be neither miraculous nor catastrophic, and given my general pessimistic nature and my occasionally embarrassing superstitions, this seemed like a largely positive artifact.

Fuck Gaia

Attaching intention to the ecosystem is an absurd and naive move. The Gaia hypothesis didn't begin that way, but has become that. Its more recent rebuttal the Medean hypothesis is fun but no less absurd. The ecosystem is a complex system of patterns (which sounds redundant but truly isn't). Their is no magical intention that the system has, it just developed and built on itself. This is a vitally important idea for people to understand, because although the system may seem stable in the moment, it is incredibly easy to disrupt it. In fact our current ecological age is defined by our disruption of it. As such, we need to cease placing our faith in the pattern and understand that it's fragile and we can and are breaking it.