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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 went to the Super Bowl once. It was fourth grade, and Dad got tickets. The Chargers played the 49ers in Miami. The halftime show was a combination of Indiana Jones and the Miami Sound Machine. There was a 99-yard kickoff return by the Chargers, and Jerry Rice scored the first touchdown for the Niners, and Natrone Means didn’t have a very good game, and I don’t remember anything else. The 49ers won big, and we got to take our official Super Bowl XXIX seat cushions home. That’s what I remember about the game.

But I also remember that we left the game early. Dad never leaves games early — never. We stay the full nine; we play the full 60 minutes. Always. That night was an aberration. We were driving my grandpa’s car, and we didn’t really know our way around Miami, so Dad wanted to leave before the crowds starting filing out.

On the way in, we’d found ourselves an easy target to help us find our car: A 20-foot tall inflatable Lombardi Trophy. We parked right next to it, and we figured that it wouldn’t be too hard to find the giant silver football on the way out.

Except that they’d moved the trophy.

During the pregame show, we’d actually seen it, down on the field. They’d brought it inside the stadium for the fireworks and the flyover and the anthem and all that. Dad had pointed it out; we just didn’t know that the NFL only had one giant inflatable Lombardi Trophy at the Super Bowl that night.

So we walk out of the stadium, and the parking lot is almost completely unlit. The only light’s the one coming out of the stadium, and the light and noise is flooding out of there. But out in the parking lot, it’s dark. And we’re looking around, and we can’t find our giant Lombardi Trophy, and we’re realizing that it’s long since been deflated and is somewhere underneath Joe Robbie Stadium.

Joe Robbie seats 75,000 fans, and there are 60,000 cars out in the parking lot, and we’re looking for a late 80s Mercedes station wagon, and we can’t see anything, because it’s pitch black, and any minute, 75,000 fans are going to walk out of Joe Robbie, and we’re going to be stuck in the parking lot forever.

This was fourth grade, when the keyless entry — or as my mother still calls it, the Boop-Boop — was just becoming a thing. Grandpa’s car didn’t have it. So we couldn’t even just walk around pressing the button on the keys, hoping the car might honk back at us. We were really, really lost.

I remember dad saying that maybe our best option was just to wait for all the cars to empty out of the parking lot. Once all the rest of the cars were gone, it probably wouldn’t be that hard to find ours — theoretically speaking.

Dad wasn’t all that enthused about the prospect of us spending the night wandering around a Miami parking lot, just a a dad and a 10-year-old, two seat cushions, one wallet and a whole lot of dark.

We kept walking around.

I don’t remember when we found the car, only that we did. I don’t remember how long we walked around the parking lot — 15 or 20 minutes, at the least. It seemed longer. When you’re unhappy and lost, time always seems to stretch.

Now for a happier thought: High up on the list of things that comfort me when everything goes wrong, there’s Explosions in the Sky. They’re this amazing instrumental band from Austin, and they have this way of turning little moments in life into something worthy of Technicolor. I love one of their songs most of all: “Your Hand in Mine.” There’s a moment in the song, about two minutes in, where the song just breaks, and out of it comes this simple, soaring set of chords. No matter how fucked I am, no matter how bad things seem, that little melody reminds me of how things will pass. I listen to them, and good things always seem to come this way.

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.

In 2008, I studied abroad in Spain. It wasn’t necessarily the most challenging academic experience of my life. The school where I took classes had palm trees on campus. I got a month off for spring break. I lived a block away from the beach.

But most damning of all: That semester, I got 4000-level honors credit for walking.

There’s this famous walk in Spain, called the Camino de Santiago. I was given the option of walking four days of the Camino, about 100 miles in all. Complete that, and write a five-page paper — in English, mind you — and I’d get honors credit.

So along with 20 or 30 of my fellow students, I walked.

One of our professors, Armando, was our guide. We’d start the morning in a Camino hostel. He’d tell us where to stop for lunch. We’d have lunch as a group, and he’d tell us where to stop for the night. It was a nice routine: Wake up, eat, walk, eat, hydrate, walk, eat, take shots of strange green alcohol by the side of the road, eat, sleep, repeat.

The third day, I was walking with two of my friends, CG and Jamie. We’d stopped for lunch in a field somewhere, and Armando told us we had about 3 or 4 hours of walking to the next town. We started walking. Maybe 90 minutes later, we came to a roundabout in a small town. We kept walking. It started to rain. CG and Jamie wore trashbags as raincoats. We walked through fields, and up and down hills. We walked for a very long time, waiting for our evening destination to appear.

And then: A town. We walked around, looking for the hostel. There was a woman walking outside her home, and we asked her how much further we had to walk until we’d get to the town Armando had talked about.

She told us we’d already passed it. It was six or seven miles the other way. It was the town with the roundabout that we’d just breezed through.

Oh, fuck.

We started trying to call Armando on our cell phones, but it wasn’t easy getting cell phone reception in middle-of-nowhere Spain. CG got a bar, and Armando picked up. We were unhappy and wet. Armando was happy and full and drinking strange green liquid out of shot glasses.

He suggested we walk back, but there was no way we were walking six miles in reverse just to walk it forward again the next day. We told Armando we wanted to go onto the next town.

Okay, he said. There’s a monastery a mile up the road. Keep walking, stay there, and we’ll see you at lunchtime tomorrow.

So we walked, through the fields, through the rain. The monastery appeared. We walked to the front door. It looked like the front door for a dungeon. We knocked.

There was no one there. It was 6 or 7 p.m. by now, and it was almost completely dark, and we were very wet, and there was no one there to show us how to get inside.

So we walked around the building. There was a light in one window. The monastery, it turns out, had a gift shop. We knocked and knocked on the gift shop door. This woman came out, annoyed. We told her we were walking the Camino. We asked where the beds were.

She pointed us toward the front door we’d already seen, and walked back inside. We started to bang on the door again. We pleaded with her. We were tired, and we were wearing trashbags. Please, ma’am, show us where to stay.

And seeing that we weren’t going to leave her alone, she stepped out and pointed the way. She guided us to a small doorway, and opened it up. Inside: A giant room, ceilings 50 or 60 feet high. Several bunk beds. No heat. No hot water.

But for a night: Home. Better than sleeping on the wet grass outside. Better than walking back to the town we’d already missed.

We were cold, but thankful. When I think about how lucky we were to have messed up and still found our way to a bed, it comforts me. I don’t know how we screwed up and found our way to that monastery, but we did. We were dry, and that was comfort enough.