Luck seems to follow me wherever I go. Even on a normal day when I some work that muse is right behind me. What is the nature of good luck? Getting lucky? I don’t mean winning the lottery or living a long and healthy life. I don’t know either, you tell me. I feel very tired and my blog is way behind, now tell myself I have to write something about luck. What are we anyway? It is of course just interpretation. I just felt bedazzlingly lucky because of the delicious coffee that was served by the beautiful waitress here in Gallo 702 in Buenos Aires. The waitress wears braces that are glued to her teeth. I can see it when she smiles. That’s a pure observation, don’t you think?
An observation of the kind I want to make them. Preserving our pureness in observing, our mis-en-scène of perceptional innocence that’s what I want to do. The waitress. So luck is just a feeling I hear you sigh. A no-brainer. That guy just feels lucky about the little joys of life. Such a cliché. But wait a minute please. Saying you are lucky because the coffee you ordered and paid for is saying you are lucky because you get what you are entitled to. And we are all entitled to good luck and happiness (American constitution). To say you got lucky because you got what you ought to get is to behave in an unacceptable way. We cannot accept that I call this luck, because it destroys the concept of luck. It insults people who don’t feel lucky when they got what they ought to get. So, apart from being an insult to some people, I have no idea what my luck is. And I am not interested to know it.
In San Telmo there is a market and a lot of street artists. Painters, musicians. Tourist as far as the eye can see. A painter painted Amy Winehouse in very bright colours using his fingers to the rhythm of her latest record. The result was pretty amazing. The guy kept dancing around in front of the canvas and threw spicks of white, green, purple, blue on it after shaping the characteristic face of madame Winehouse with his hands. He attracted a lot of people with his life-painting. Look! He is doing something. Doing something? Yes, do-ing. Someone is doing something here. That attracts people like flies.
In a café I wrote a few pages. I want to write faster than you can read but I will never succeed. My writing is nothing to write home about. But to deliberately choose this mediocrity is such a liberation of the spirit. Once you accepted you are producing crap and crap only, you can start living. Like a pig in the mud, the mud feels so good on the cold pig-skin. And after many years you might think about other pigs, rolling in the same mudpool. Never mind. I want to demonstrate that badness has a place in the world, that bad writing just like bad acting, bad composing, bad playing, bad sex, bad relationships, bad eend, bad jokes and bad weather has its place on the earth. I will never be able to proof this. Once this is read and known, a one-way process of recognition, of approval and assessment of a certain quality will be started. A process like a ticking timebomb. What will come out will be goodness, and the badness will be forgetten. Why can’t I safe the badness?
A Canadian hairdresser came and asked me to use his computer. A little reluctant at first, I saw this man was a real tourist and I let him send an email from my machine. He paid for my coffee my friends had already paid for. Luck had put a few licks of her ointment too much on my forehead.
In the metro on my way back home I saw a smile. I saw the cutest smile I had seen in years. The smile was on the face of a girl and the girl was Sara. Or rather, she ought to be Sara, but she wasn’t. That smile changed to another metro line and I changed too. She gave me a telephone number and all that and I decided to call her. Felt a bit like in a movie. The question “who is this person?” I mean when you really ask this question you feel very much alive.