You may have heard of the Midas Touch. It does not refer to mufflers, rather the fable of a man whose touch turned everything into gold. Lesser known is another fable I created to describe my luck at a point in my life years ago. It’s called the Reverse Midas Touch. Everything I touched turned into a mixture of hay and water put through a horse.

During my late teenage years and early 20s I seemed to possess the first recorded case of this phenomenon. It seemed to follow me wherever I went. Another way to explain was that I seemed to be suffering from a near terminal case of stupid...