Friday The 13th

Friday the 13th was a pretty big deal when I was a kid. Either you used it as an excuse for all the bad luck you experienced that day, or you were a fan of the horror movie franchise and could usually find at least one of them playing late in the evening on local cable (when such a thing was the standard). I fell into the latter category, having snuck into the living room in the middle of the night and watched a VHS tape of Friday the 13th Part VI: Jason lives. My father had rented it for himself and I got curious so I did what any typical kid back then; I got up and watched it. It was 10-years old. It was all down hill from there…

The day in particular owes itself to a rather unfortunate history. Some view it as a back luck day while others actually see it as good day. It’s kind of like black cats; everyone seems to think that black cats are bad luck. Unless you’re stuck in the matrix and you view it as being a glitch in the system, there’s nothing that’s bad luck about black cats. The same can be said about Friday the 13th. It was especially horrendous during my law enforcement days when anyone in uniform would dread working it, thinking it would carry some excess of criminal complaints by virtue of the date.

There are many stories from different backgrounds surrounding this date. For myself, I was raised in a Catholic household and one of the stories was that the Last Supper had 13 guests (Christ and his apostles) and that the following day was Good Friday. Although that’s a good story, since the Gregorian calendar wasn’t invented until the late 1500’s, that first Good Friday couldn’t have been dated as such. Who knows, right? I wasn’t there…

There’s another thing I read somewhere in viking lore, where apparently 12 gods were having dinner in Valhalla when an unwanted 13th god snuck in, uninvited. That would be Loki, of course. Not the MCU Loki but the actual Norse god from mythology. While there, Loki killed one of the other gods, causing the world to fall into darkness, which is why the Vikings consider the number 13 to be unlucky. Don’t quote me on any of this, I’m going from memory based on stuff I read a long time ago.

There are similar instances of “unlucky” dates in other countries/societies. For example, the Greeks believe that Tuesday the 13th is an unlucky because it’s associated with their God of War. For the most part, I never noticed an increase in complaints or criminal activity when I was with law enforcement. And despite people’s propensity for thinking there’s some correlation between the date and bad luck, it’s just another day. And as we get older, some superstitions tend to fade away. That’s why it’s Sunday morning and I only JUST realized that we passed a Friday the 13th, the day before yesterday. Go figure…☯️