Oops

Mistakes

We all make mistakes.  They are a part of life.  Sometimes, they are unavoidable.   We call them “honest” mistakes because we truthfully don’t mean to cause any harm by them.  And even though we don’t mean to make them, mistakes just happen. For most people, mistakes are generally something simple to resolve.  Some people never make big mistakes.  Maybe you forget to pay the gas bill, or unintentionally reveal a secret, or maybe you didn’t feed your cat yesterday.  All of those things can be resolved relatively easily.  My mistakes never work like that, though.  My mistakes always take a while to resolve, and usually, I can lose my job or my house because of them.  I like to call them “Manhattan Project” mistakes.  You know, the potential mistakes you don’t even consider because you have the best of intentions, but inevitably millions of people will die because of?  That’s my kind of mistake.   Also, I never make a mistake when life is simple.  It’s always when I have a thousand things going on and the prospect of losing my house or my job makes me want to sit in a warm tub with a bottle of wine, a Tracy Chapman CD and a razor blade.  That’s how I do mistakes. 

Nobody has fucked up this bad.  EVER. 

That’s what I tell myself when I make a mistake.  Every mistake I make, even if it’s less significant than any other mistake I’ve ever made, is the biggest travesty in the history of humanity.  It’s just a fact.  Mistakes equate to failure, and I’m already a failure when I’m not failing.  So, when something goes wrong, I automatically assume that I have destroyed every life that I have ever touched, and that my own demise is only minutes away.  

It could be the PG&E bill that was three days late.  It might be the cat I didn’t feed last night.  It could be the water hose I left on for an hour because I got distracted.  It could be a call at work from across the country requesting something I had no idea about.  It doesn’t even have to be my mistake.  I am always CONVINCED that my mistakes will, quite certainly, destroy life as I have ever known it. 

Flares Sightings

This afternoon, in the vicinity of Bodega Avenue and Tomales Road, flares were spotted.  Actually, it wasn’t just flares.  There were sirens and alarms and red flags and guys with automatic rifles conducting room searches.  The whole place may as well have been on lockdown.  Shit got real.  All because of a case of mistaken identity.  My case of mistaking an identity.  All because of me and MY mistake today.   Oh, today.  Two days before the day that the rest of my life hinges on.  Today.  The day I need to prove my worth more than any other day in my entire life.  Today.  Today, I made the mistake that redefines mistakes.  EFF YOU, TODAY!!!!

OK.  Real Talk. 

None of that actually happened.  There were no flares or fires or guns.  But that’s how I envisioned my mistake.  It wasn’t just a big deal.  It was about to alter the course of history.  But as I sat here chronicling my single handed effort at destroying society as we know it, it occurred to me how ridiculous it sounded.  Yes, maybe I should have paid more attention to what was going on.  Or maybe I should have paid less attention to what was going on.  Maybe I could have saved myself some embarrassment.  Maybe I could have saved some very busy people some of their very precious time.  But considering what those people have to waste their time on, any given day, this mistake wasn’t nearly as horrifying as I created it to be in my mind.  Honestly, I still may lose my job for it.  If nothing else, I am going to lose a little respect.   But it isn’t the end of the world.  And it didn’t cause any solar storms that will send the Earth spinning off its axis.  It was a mistake.  It was honest and unintentional.  It was the definition of a mistake.   And eventually, I will come to peas with it.