This past Friday was Friday the 13th. Okay, if you’re the president, it was “the day after the latest round of New Dawn promises.” I’m an incorrigible hedger of bets, and that’s why I’m a religious agnostic. I reckon that, if I die and discover the believers were right, that there really is a heaven after all, I can fall back on plausible deniability, unlike atheists.
All this is a preamble to my confession that, while I don’t believe in the Friday the 13th hocus, my plan was to avoid going out on that day altogether. There’s no reason to take unnecessary risks, and there’s a tiny chance the curse is real. Blaise Pascal of the notorious Pascal’s Wager would be proud of me.
But as fortune would have it, I was forced to leave the house, owing to a client. The first warning to abort the mission was the gate sensor malfunctioning and almost taking out my tail light. Strike one. Barely 10 seconds into my driving down the street, a kamikaze Sixty60 scooter overtook me from the left, splashing muddy pothole water on my left mirror and side window. Strike two. And no sooner had I joined Main Reef than … I saw a major roadblock ahead.
As befits the date, my car won the random selection lottery and was pulled over. The officer pointed out the small matter of an expired disc on my windscreen — something I had been planning to deal with for the last couple of weeks. Strike three. After taking the ticket with good grace, I pushed on towards my appointment, reminding myself all the while my religion is science and I don’t believe in this flapdoodle.
When my righteous indignation abates, I remind myself that belief in old wives’ tales is a universal phenomenon. While my people may believe it’s bad luck to separate two individuals strolling towards you by walking between them, others think breaking a mirror will bring seven years of bad luck
Let me interrupt this riveting blow-by-blow account of my bad luck to indulge in some virtue signalling. One of the reasons I’m so gleeful about mocking Western superstitions is because in my youth I read the literary masterpieces of Mark Twain and Harper Lee. While these two writers are close to the top of my list of favourite American novelists, and I appreciate they wrote about folks of the negroid persuasion with tongues very much in cheek, I always hated the stereotype they perpetuated about black people believing in voodoo balderdash. There’s some mlungu on TikTok who plays pranks on black hitchhikers, exposing their irrational fears of the mythical tikoloshe for likes and laughs. I hate that, for all the “woke” umbrage I take, I have nevertheless sometimes lost a mouthful of rooibos through my nostrils while watching some of his clips.
When my righteous indignation abates, I remind myself that belief in old wives’ tales is a universal phenomenon. While my people may believe it’s bad luck to separate two individuals strolling towards you by walking between them, others think breaking a mirror will bring seven years of bad luck. My people may be firmly of the view that hadedas flying over a homestead announce a death in the family, but others say a black cat crossing your path is a bad omen. And yet, in a spectacular display of Pascal’s Wager, my scientific wife and I willingly participated in a fascinating ritual during our “traditional” nuptials. Apparently, until she was smeared with bile from a goat’s gall bladder, my ancestors wouldn’t accept her as a Zulu wife in good standing.
That said, it warms my heart to know the Western world takes morbid fear of the number 13 to the point that not just one but two terms — triskaidekaphobia (fear of the number itself) and paraskevidekatriaphobia (fear of Friday the 13th) — exist in the lexicon. Today I have a flight to catch, and it makes me feel better about my people’s obsession with slitting the throats of goats to know that even Boeing does not permit a row 13 on their machines.
And here is some good news: a Friday the 13th in February means the next Friday the 13th is less than a month away, unless we’re in a leap year, so I get to take a second bite at being a little more reasonable in 26 days. Human rationality is a myth, and even lowly chickens are unafraid of Friday the 13th, having the good sense to accept that the murder rate of chickens is roughly 100%. Whether it’s Friday the 13th or the 30th, the odds of ending up on the Woolies rotisserie remain even.
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