Hi there.

Right.

Ok, so...

Have I ever told you about the October Curse?

S, C, and I went up after work last night to see the Dar Williams show, which, in one of the night's few saving graces, turned out to be lovely. The downside? My car was towed and while waiting to pick it up we had a little encounter that got kind of scary to say the least.

We parked in the same lot that C and I had used last time we went to this theater, went and had some Thai before the concert, and when we came back to go into the theater my car was missing. It was then that we saw the sign (half covered by vines) that parking in the lot was no longer allowed. So since there was no sense in missing the concert we had come all this way to see, we went on into the Vic. Besides the people in front of us who had waaaay too much beer and could not sit still, it was a great concert... at least when I could stop thinking about poor little Claudia Jean (that's my car) sitting in some impound lot somewhere.

After the show we got a taxi to take us way up Clark street to a pretty scary neighborhood where we found the towing company and a few other women who had had their cars towed from the lot near the Vic. The guy behind the glass was completely ignoring us while he talked on the phone. Then he finally helped the two groups in front of us and disappeared again, leaving the three of us girls standing alone on the sidewalk in front of this sketchy place.

That was when things got scary. As we were standing there alone a man came up and started doing the usual creepy-guy-on-the-street chatting thing. He sounded kind of like Fenster from The Usual Suspects, but said that his English was so bad because he was Polish. He then proceeded to muscle his way past S and C until he was standing in the vestibule of the towing company, right next to me. He asked my name and when I told him I wasn't going to tell him he got all huffy and started singing "American Woman, get away from me..." Then he started saying that all he needed was someone to break a twenty. I was terrified that the night was going to end on a much worse note, with him taking my wallet and all of my ID and leaving us with no way to get my car back. The man inside the towing company didn't even glance our way once while he was talking on the phone. I'm pretty sure I could have screamed and he would have kept talking. So I started cursing the Polish guy out ("Get the fuck away from me," and so on.), hoping that if we made ourselves seem less like easy targets he would give up and go away. He finally took off when S pulled out her cell phone and said she was going to call the police. When I woke up this morning I was still shaking and had a sick feeling in the pit of my stomach. Nothing happened to us, and he may have just been after change for a twenty like he said, but we were in a situation where anything could have happened and there wouldn't have been anyone to help us. Certainly not the man who made us wait on the sidewalk for a full twenty minutes while he talked on the phone and did something with spreadsheets and terminal windows on his computer. He's probably an Internet spammer. What else could you do with such a small, twisted, shriveled soul?

When the man finally came to the window to take my $150(!) he let us in to the back where the cars were, and then went back to his telephone and made the next group of people (who had showed up just after creepy guy left) wait even longer. Someone in line speculated that he was trying to make people wait until after midnight so he could charge them for an extra day's storage. (It was 11:15 at this point.) Claudia Jean was blocked in behind two other cars, so we had to go hunt down the guy with the tow truck in the lot to move them for us, which took probably another 10 minutes or so. Then we were finally free.

The rest of the night was just Chicago's usual hair-raising traffic. It took us more than an hour to get as far as the start of I-57. They had cones out on 94 for some mysterious invisible construction that narrowed the highway down to one lane. So it was about 2:45 in the morning by the time we made it back to Champaign. I'm guessing I must have been going on pure adrenaline, because I don't know how I managed to handle last night and make the drive back. I've never been so glad to see my bed.

So what does all of this have to do with the curse I mentioned at the start? Well, this is the second year in a row that S and I have had Octobers that were so miserable that we found ourselves praying for November to roll around. To tell the truth, I had forgotten about last year's curse and just thought my terrible month so far had been random chance. Until last night, when the month was drawing to a close in such a spectacularly bad way. (Although S had the worst experience this month by far. Yes, worse than getting your car towed and almost getting mugged. Far far worse.)

We bemoaned the curse and wondered what we ever did to October that it hates us so. Then, about halfway through the drive back, it hit me. The only possible explanation! What good thing has happened the last two Octobers? Two baseball teams that fans thought would never ever ever win the Series... did. Years of pent-up bad luck suddenly turned to good. But all things need balance, so where did all that bad luck go? I propose that it redistributed itself to individuals all around the country, forcing us to suffer horrible Octobers, all to balance out the luck in the world.

If the Cubs ever win the pennant, frankly, I'll be lucky to make it out of October alive.

Hold me.