I suppose we're far enough past it to discuss it now, though I've no illusion that it won't come around again. Each time the moon comes around, the odds will play me.

I'm not the first to observe that the full moon warps probability a bit, or perhaps it's just our perception of it. But I seem to encounter that warp more intimately than most - perhaps because I watch the moons, perhaps because I watch the odds. Whatever the reason for it or lack thereof, I think there's more than enough reason to look for the unreasonable when the moon comes up as the sun goes down. This past week has been proof of that and more.

Take one example, the most innocuous one I could find: a simple stop at a vending machine. I was buying a coke (not a soda, not a pop) in my local parking garage. It's built to drop the product and the change right around my shins, an indignity I endure because I understand that it uses gravity to function, the most reliable thing that there is. Gravity is always on, and it works the same way every single time, or so you'd think.

As the routine business concluded, the two quarters I received in change clinked differently than one would expect. The second glanced off the first, and hopped right out of the perfectly well-designed metal tray where it should have come to rest. All right, okay, that happens. I suppressed the grunt to which my age entitles me, as I bent to the concrete and skill-craned my coin with my fingernails. Succeeding in this, I tossed the coin up to grasp it more conventionally, as has been my style with such things for ages.

It seemed to sail on me in the still air, and the tip of my middle finger set that honest-seeming coin spinning as I missed the catch. The parabola it described seemed a normal enough curve - until the damned thing LANDED ON ITS EDGE, with its violent spin precisely neutralized, and began to roll away from me.

It took a course I could follow, and so I did; I paced it for several steps. It did finally fall over, and allow itself to be retrieved without further incident. It happened to have traced the path I was about to walk anyway, and it led me halfway to the next door that I needed.

The significance of all this is minute at most - but try to duplicate it. You could buy every coke in America hundreds of times over, and that couldn't happen that way again. Hell, try to flip a quarter in the air so that it rolls on its edge for fifteen feet in a direction you were going anyway. You can go through your piggy bank quite a few times before you manage that.

Perhaps we're far enough past the dangerous time that nothing odd would happen, if you were to try now.

Maybe it is just all about the moon being full - all these amazingly, interestingly unlikely things I'm observing - and all you'll get for trying is exactly what you'd expect.

Hell, call me up first, we'll try it together.

For all I know, it's really all about me.