Run Good Karma?

Despite seeing myself as quite hard headed,cynical and not at all into religious or spiritual mumbo jumbo I do still say hello to lone magpies and slap the roof above me twice as I leave the football.

I'm more of a ( Terminator philosophy,I'm very cultured) "No fate but what we make" than a karma kind of guy but the supermarket checkout operator who served me today reckons I have good things coming to me after I paid the bill for the old lady in front of me in the queue.She had a ton of stuff all picked from the reduced section and even although it only came to less than £3 she said the total wasn't what she expected and started to pick out items to return.

Does karma still work when I only paid her bill because I was in a hurry to get to the post office before it shut? Who knows!

Come to think of it I do try and go through the same turnstyle at the football if we won the week before and was cursing myself for recording the Old Firm game last week because we never seem to win when I tape ( or whatever the digital word is) Rangers v them.I suppose all these wee superstitions come down to trying to feel as if I have some control over the outcome which is obviously nonsense.

Before reading "The Mental Game of Poker" I used to regularly predict the turn and river card that would crack my poker hand and it seemed that more often than not I'd be right.It's a hard habit to break but I try and focus on believing the board is going to brick out and although deep down I know it doesn't make a hoot of difference what I'm thinking as the cards fall I reckon using "positive confirmation bias" in this way can only help my mental state when playing.

It's sometimes hard to shift illogical thoughts.I was sad to hear that poker and gambling legend Amarillo "Slim" Preston died last Sunday.I have an Ace of Spades he signed with a good luck message in my wallet ( the fact that it's made out to "Janice" is only a minor detail) and when I walked away from my near fatal car crash in Nov '09 part of me put my luck down to that being in my wallet.Now despite knowing
my fate had nothing to do with a playing card it's still there tucked away in my wallet.

Perhaps it's like people who are not religious praying to God in situations of serious crisis or illness in the family.They don't actually suddenly believe in a sky fairy but they don't lose anything by praying just in case they're wrong.

Enough wittering for what was going to be a very short post.It's taken so much longer to write than I expected that I've not eaten yet and have probably missed registering for an early evening tourney I was destined to win....

Ok,one more wee thing.I had a laugh at the front page of my local paper last week.It carried a story about a guy who went to his kids school for a parents night and lost the plot because it turned out to be a meeting about a new curriculum.He shouted "This is a lot of shite" and punched an off duty police woman who tried to restrain him.

He was hauled up to court and the bit that tickled me was his defence lawyers quote that this was "completely out of character" for the accused.This was just before he was found guilty and fined at which point he lost his rag again and starting shouting "Do you think I'm a fuckin' Millionaire?" at the judge.Obviously just another "out of character" moment.

Back soon...