Author: Dan Oshinsky

Things tend to go wrong. This is a series of blog posts about the things I think about during those moments when the wrong things happen.

Two years ago, I was pretty sure I’d just torn something in my knee. I’d gotten these new running shoes that were supposed to encourage me to run on the balls of my feet. They were supposed to change my running motion and turn me into some sort of super-runner. I was going to run like my name was Forrest Gump.

Except that I didn’t follow the instructions quite right. I was told to start slow. Run a half-mile at first. Then a mile. Then maybe 1.5, and keep at that pace for a few days. Add up the milage slowly.

But I got impatient. I only run two or three times a week, max, and it felt stupid to run for four minutes and then stop. And then come back the next day, run seven minutes, and stop.

So I did the mile run. Then the two. Then the next day, I ran like Jenny was yelling at me. Four, maybe five miles. I felt great.

The next day, I woke up, and I couldn’t move. I was a 22-year-old with a geriatric’s knees.

I went to yoga and talked to my teacher. She tried some stuff. I iced the knee. I heated the knee. I stretched the knee.

For four months.

It got a little better.

I’d long since put away the special shoes, so I’m not sure what made me do it. Maybe I was cocky. Maybe I was dumb.

But I decided to try out the shoes again. I liked them. Or, rather — I wanted to like them. I thought I was supposed to like them.

I went for a short run, maybe two miles. This was in June 2010. I felt alright.

I woke up in the morning, and my knee was worse than ever. And this time, no amount of ice, no amount of yoga could make it better.

I had to get it fixed immediately. I had just made a big decision: I was going to give this news syndicate, Stry, a chance. I was leaving for Biloxi, Miss., in two weeks. I was leaving my job, my paycheck — and my health care situation wasn’t exactly figured out.

I found the doctors in San Antonio who worked on the Spurs. If anybody could figure out my knees, it was going to be these guys.

They tested it out. The doc put some pressure on my knee. My eyes went screwy.

“Hurts, doesn’t it?” the doc said. “Probably a torn meniscus. Maybe an ACL. We’ll take an MRI.”

They did. I went home and tried to cry, but I was too busy worrying to even make that happen. I had torn up my knee, and I was moving away from my job, and a paycheck, and health care. I was going to Biloxi for three months, and I wasn’t sure I could walk.

The MRI took a few days to process. I worried constantly. What if it was a torn ACL? What if they had to operate? What if I had to walk around Biloxi on crutches? How the hell was I going to interview people on crutches?

I worried myself into that state where I could hardly move, save for going to work and ordering breakfast tacos through a drive-thru window. I waited for the call. I feared the call.

Then the call came, and it turned out I had massive swelling in the knee. No damage. No tear. Put it on ice, and it’ll be fine, son.

So, onto the happy thought for the moment: There’s this video I edited freshman year. It was the first weekend of the NCAA Tournament. My friend, Tyler, was shooting some video for a journalism class. He’d gone down to a local bar to get footage of fans watching the early games. The bar was full of Iowa fans, and that day, Iowa — the no. 3 seed — lost to Northwestern State on a buzzer beater.

And Tyler got the most amazing footage of a group of middle-aged white guys, their Hawkeye hearts absolutely breaking in real time.

I like to watch that clip, sometimes, and think about how easy it is to get caught up in the unimportant things. I think about how easy it is to take a tiny thing and magnify it beyond any sort of reasonable scale. I think about how I get mad over things I can’t control.

I did it with my knee, and I’ve done it since. But something about seeing what I actually look like in those lousy moments — and the guys in that YouTube video look exactly like I look when every fucking thing goes wrong — typically reminds me of how I need to get a grip and get over it.

Here’s to you, Hawkeye fans, for helping me get there.

Things tend to go wrong. This is a series of blog posts about the things I think about during those moments when the wrong things happen.

I had Mrs. Buckingham for 10th grade English. I don’t remember that much about her anymore; I do seem to recall that she had white hair, and she was slightly plump, but I’m not quite sure about anything beyond that; in my mind, I’ve kind of replaced her with Mrs. Doubtfire.

But I do remember that in the spring semester, she assigned each student something grammar-related and asked us to give a presentation about it. Some students were assigned punctuation marks, or something relating to syntax.

I was assigned the anecdote.

And then I did what 10th graders do on semi-meaningless presentations: I stalled. For a month, I did nothing. I watched other students give five-minute mini-lectures on the exclamation point and the semi-colon. But I knew I didn’t have to present for a few weeks.

So I did nothing.

A week passed. Then two. Then three. The weekend before my presentation — I remember I was presenting on a Monday — I decided I had to start on my big anecdote presentation.

Except that I didn’t. I watched some football on Saturday. Went out with some friends that night. And then it was Sunday — the last day. I was all set to figure out how to explain the mystery that is the anecdote to my peers.

And then my friend, Sam, called, and asked if I wanted to go play golf with our friend, Brett. I did. I had a red Oldsmobile 88 that had been handed down from my grandpa. It had these cloth seats that you just sunk into, and the front seat was actually a bench seat, so the thing seated three in both the front and the back. The 88 was as wide as a Suburban and nearly as long; parallel parking it felt a little like parking a small cruise ship. The 88 had a trunk that sunk down almost to the pavement, and it was plenty big enough for three sets of golf clubs. So we took my car.

I don’t remember much about the round we played. What I do remember is the drive back down I-270. I was in the left lane, and the 88 had a way of lulling me to sleep in those big, cloth seats. I looked up at the dash at one point and realized that I was doing 90+ in a 55. The 88 was deceptively fast like that, but it also wasn’t much designed for high speeds. I’m not sure Grandpa ever put the thing above 35 in all the years he drove it.

So the car started to rattle a little bit, but nothing too frightening. We pulled off the highway to drop off Sam. Sam lived down Seven Locks, a windy, up-and-down-and-up-again of a street, and when we got to Sam’s house, I remember going over this bump, and then I remember hearing a noise that sounded distinctly like a 777 flying by at low altitude.

I thought nothing of it, but when Sam was walking with his clubs into his garage, he looked back and noticed that part of the underside of my car was falling off.

Turns out that somewhere between the high speeds and the bumpity-bump of Seven Locks, the splash guard for my engine — basically, this piece of plastic that kept water from getting into parts of the engine that weren’t supposed to get wet — had lost a screw or two, and had started dragging on the ground.

But the three of us didn’t know this. We weren’t car experts. We were 16. My car knowledge was limited to whatever I’d heard on “Car Talk.” I was unaware that the splash guard is kind of like the human appendix; it has a purpose, but not much of one.

I saw this thing dangling underneath my car and assumed that it was the part of the engine that kept the rest of the engine from, you know, just falling out onto the street. I saw this part and assumed that it was, in the most meaningful sense of the word, essential to the working ability of my motor vehicle.

So we did what any 16-year-olds would do in a situation where our mode of transportation was on the verge of collapse: We went into Sam’s garage, grabbed a roll of duct tape and turned the underside and front of my car into a rolling 3M ad.

And then I drove off for Brett’s house at about 25 miles an hour.

Somewhere along the way, I started to fear that my 88 was basically turning into the sled from “Cool Runnings,” and that my carburetor or something equally important-sounding was just going to plop out and land on River Road, and my parents were going to kill me.

And then I realized that I was going to have to explain this whole thing — the whole, Uh, I think my engine is dangling by a thread and some duct tape situation — to my mother.

But then, while slowing down traffic and doing 25 in a 45, I realized what I had to do: When I saw my mother, I had to lighten the mood. I had to walk into the house and tell her something that would distract her from the disaster that was my car. I had to tell her something that would simultaneously make her laugh and help her understand the situation.

What I needed was an anecdote. Only an anecdote would do.

And suddenly, I knew just what I’d be talking about in Mrs. Buckingham’s class the next day.

Which brings me back to this:

When I’m convinced that every fucking thing is going wrong, what I find is that it usually helps to think about how absurdly tiny my problems are. This fantastic little narrative by Carl Sagan is especially helpful. It is the very definition of perspective.

In it, he points to a photo of Earth as taken from millions of miles away. The earth is just a tiny blue dot in the photo. And Sagan says:

“Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every ‘superstar,’ every ‘supreme leader,’ every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there–on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

“The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds.

“Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light.”

And holy mother of Buddha does that make every mistake seem a little less epic.