Jason Day

This is a thrown-together couple minutes—camera crew came to the office, got a reel together to zap to all the news/radio places (thus: I’m on the radio a lot this morning). Also, I hear that I was wrong about Memorial Day. So it goes.

Anyway, what I kept getting asked was what’s up with the day Friday the 13th? So, in short, here’s what I see, none of which is really original, all of which packs into a bigger and bigger snowball:

•  13 people at the Last Supper, and one of them was momentarily to die, thus: 13’s unlucky
• in 1307, on a Friday the 13th, a bunch of Templars were all run down, and jailed or killed, thus: Friday the 13th wasn’t a lucky day for them, so much. Maybe it’s just unlucky, period.
• Friday the 13ths feel like a kind of rare convergence of irregularly-numbered months—months have different amounts of days—and of the seven days of the week. Thus, on the occasion that these two seeming-arbitrary number systems line up, it feels targeted, like the crosshairs on falling on that particular Friday, for SOME reason . . . [evidently a Friday the 13th shows up at least every 14 months, for math reasons]
• 12 is a whole number, 13’s off into the strange. Just look at a clock, how, when you’re not on military time, “12” is as high as you go. If you somehow find yourself at “13”? Then you’ve taken a wrong turn, are in 1984-land . . . (“It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.”).
• “13” and “31” share the same digits, and, since “31” is all haunted up by Halloween, then some of that much leaking over to “13,” yes?
• That novel from 1907 (that I’ve never read nor seen), Thomas Lawson’s Friday, the 13th, about staging a Wall Street crash on Friday the 13th
• And, of course, Jason Voorhees was born on Friday the 13th, 1946. Too? Using that day for the franchise was evidently halfway random.