O P I N I O N
NOT THAT PROFOUND
By Nathan Graziano
I woke up on Sunday morning and noticed a tick on the one anatomical place no male wants to find a tick.
You’ve heard of Elf on a Shelf, now get ready for…
After finishing a “Home Alone” scream and running frantically around the house looking for my wife’s tweezers, I removed the offending bug, gave my dog Buster the stink-eye1 then laid down on the couch and stared at the ceiling, without blinking, a good half an hour.
This was yet another event in a series of devastating and traumatic events that have befallen me since the beginning of 2025.
It started with the inauguration of Donald Trump, which, quite honestly, has been devastating and traumatic for anyone in this country who cares about human rights and decency.
Then, in February, I fell on my face moving a futon into the basement, knocking out my front teeth and breaking my nose.
On Valentine’s Day, one of our cats dropped dead in the kitchen at 6 a.m. while my wife and I were getting ready for work.
More recently, my basement—the one place in this world that I truly call my own—inexplicably flooded.
Now, there is The Tick Incident.
I haven’t had a run a bad luck like this in quite some time, if ever2, and my only conclusion is that someone put a curse on me.
How else can you explain this snow bomb of bad fortune? Can this simply be attributed to the normal vicissitudes of the human experience? This seems way outside the range of normal. Any gambler will tell you that there is no logical explanation for luck—good or bad—but it does seem to stick to certain people at certain times in life.
So I’m opting to explain the recent bad luck in my life as some kind of curse, voodoo, or hex. I grew up a avid Red Sox fan so I already know all about curses. Babe Ruth placed a curse on the entire franchise after they traded him in 1919, and the curse lingered for 86 years before it was finally broken by a blood sacrifice for 86 years.
I am, however, curious to know who placed the curse on me.
At first, I suspected my wife, who is witchy and mystical and earthy, and she had more reasons than any person on earth to put a curse on me. But it could also be any number of ex-girlfriends with their own reasons to wish me ill-will.
It could also be a former student angry about a grade, or a reader who follows this column, or any Trump supporter for any number of reasons.
Not that it matters. I’ve had a curse placed on me, and it needs to be removed.
After some quick research—Google-searching “remove curse”—I found a few solutions, such as taking a salt bath and reciting a spell, smudging myself, performing a candle spell, or creating a mirror box.
But these seem too labor-intensive.
So any witches out there who might be reading this, I could use your help. My wife has agreed to smudge me and my entire basement, but that has yet to happen, and I can’t afford to wait for another tick to find me.
- Apparently, his tick repellant is working. ↩︎
- Let’s not even speak about my run of losses on DraftKings. ↩︎
You can reach Nate Graziano at ngrazio5@yahoo.com