Accidents

First off, let me state unequivocally that I didn’t mean for the Obama mask to end up at the bottom of Lake Union; that said, I also have to admit that I wasn’t really sad to see it go.

I’m not sorry that I winged it over my shoulder; I do apologize for drowning it and for any pain or sense of loss experienced by its owner.

I throw myself on the mercy of the court. What can I say?

Accidents happen.

Just ask anyone who hit the curb of the “ghettodrome” in Seattle Center and fell on her wrist breaking it bad enough to misplace a debit card; or somebody else who imbibed Jello shots and woke up with a mouth tasting of cat shit; or consider all those, yours truly, included, who spun out on the wet grass of South Lake Union and are regretting the way their groin muscles feel today.

Accidents happen.

“The best laid plans of mice and men go oft awry,” wrote the poet Robert Burns, and when you’ve got a drunken bike gang whose plans, such as they are, aren’t so much lain as thrown down in a heap like a giant bike pile outside of a nightclub, then you’ve got to expect that sooner or later, in the course of an evening, the unanticipated is going to occur.

“Boom! Take your drawers off!” wrote the rappers The Lamborghiniz, and when you’ve got a got a white guy in a blackface mask slithering around stage, it can’t help coming off a little racist awkward, don’t you think? So if my ire at the Obama mask was slightly over-the-top, I can’t help thinking that it wasn't entirely misplaced.

Besides, on a purely aesthetic level, the thing was just bad: when I first saw it, I thought it was a Nixon face with a phoney spray-on tan.

Here’s the lesson I take: we can all do better, mask-makers, wearers, and tossers.

That’s no accident.