Beware the Darwin Fish of Doom

A quick word on protection spells.

Sometime in the late 1990s I bought the plastic Darwin Fish applique shown above at a Cincinnati head shop. I chuckled when I saw it next to the incense and bongs. About $5 and 5 minutes later it was stuck to the back of my black 1992 Honda Civic.

I’m a fairly safe driver, and I have never been one for runs of bad luck. So I was shocked a few months later when my father and I were sitting still at a red light in my Honda when I was violently rear-ended by a car driving full speed at my car’s ass.

No one was hurt, but my car was seriously messed up. The body shop had the car for more than two months and had to straighten its frame and replace most of the panels in the rear end. (It was an insurance job, so I am sure they milked it for all they could.)

When I picked up the car, the body shop owner handed me the Darwin Fish. It had survived the crash and had flown into the car’s trunk upon impact. Glad that something on the car had survived the accident, I stuck the fish back on the shiny new trunk of my Civic with some double-stick tape and drove the car home.

A month later as I was driving to lunch in Cincinnati, a dump truck aggressively tried to occupy the same physical space as my Civic, trashing the entire driver’s side of my poor car and crumpling one corner of the trunk. When I got out to survey the damage, the fish was there hanging on for dear life.

I had to go to court to get the dump truck to pay for the damage, and I began to wonder if the silver fish was a good luck charm or a magnet for disaster.