The Unbearable Lightness of Being Utterly Doomed

Bartholomew "Barty" Bumble wasn't born under a bad sign; he was born under a sign that had been repeatedly struck by lightning, then set on fire, then had a flock of pigeons mistake it for a public toilet. His first word was "oof." His last will probably be "oh, for the love of..."

His earliest memory was a birthday party where the cake spontaneously combusted, the clown got arrested for tax evasion, and a particularly aggressive goose stole his shoes. Things didn't improve. He once won a 'Free Trip to Paradise' which turned out to be a one-way ticket to a tax audit on a remote island inhabited solely by disgruntled ex-accountants.

He tried to start a small business selling 'Optimistic Pebbles.' They were immediately recalled for containing trace amounts of existential dread. He attempted to volunteer at an animal shelter; the animals immediately developed a collective phobia of him, hissing and cowering if he so much as looked in their general direction. The shelter manager politely suggested he might be "bad for morale."

Even his attempts at self-improvement backfired. He enrolled in an online mindfulness course, only for his computer to catch a virus that replaced all his files with pictures of his own face photoshopped onto various historical disasters. The final straw came when he found a four-leaf clover, triumphantly clutched it, and then promptly slipped on a rogue banana peel, plummeting into an open manhole where he discovered, to his utter despair, that the sewer water had excellent Wi-Fi. He could now stream all the news about his own increasingly bizarre misfortunes in high definition. "At least," he muttered, adjusting his tattered shirt, "the reception's good." The irony was, of course, that his phone was dead.