Das Nibelungensplat

This evening as I was walking along L Street on my way to the bus stop, I tripped on something and began a clumsy, utterly hopeless tumble. I remember it feeling like the longest fall -- forward and down, inexorably forward and down -- that I'd ever experienced. I knew it wasn't going to end well, and it seemed I had all the time in the world to dread its conclusion.

This fall had layers. It had chapters, subheadings, footnotes, and bibliography. It was the Long Day's Journey Into Night, the Ring Cycle of public urban pratfalls. If it were a meal, it would have had not only appetizer, salad, entree, and dessert but a cheese course.

I just kept going forward, my hands flung out desperately ahead of me, my bag swinging on my shoulder, my feet bumping along the cement like Fred Flintstone's trying to skid to a stop in his bottomless car.

I finally came to rest in a gully of grayish water between curb and street (it had poured only an hour or so earlier), rush-hour traffic inching by me slowly enough to observe my every move.

I immediately stood up and said, "Goddammit, all that from such a little thing!" (I don't know what I had tripped on, but I knew it was small, and those were the words that came out of my mouth.) A man said, pointing at something on the sidewalk behind me, "It was that [unintelligible]!" At least three people asked if I was all right, one of them from her car.

"I'm fine!" I said. "I'm fine!" and kept walking.

It was then that I noticed my entire right leg was soaking wet, and I had a hole in the knee of my pants (not to mention a skinned knee, just like when I was a kid). They were my favorite pants, though they weren't expensive -- just from Le Gap, of course. (I don't own any expensive clothes, except for that shirt I bought in New York last summer.)

It was a supremely humiliating moment -- especially since I then had to get on the bus looking the way I did. But it also made me think of a routine that Ellen DeGeneres does in her HBO show from a few years back, Here and Now, one of the funniest standup shows I've ever seen in my life. I've watched it three or four times, and my laughter never diminishes. It's so hilarious it hurts. Seriously, if you haven't seen it, see it.

Anyway, she does a bit about those times when we trip in public and then immediately try to cover it up by breaking into a silly, temporary little jog. On stage, she pretends to trip and then imitates her clumsy self saying, "Oh, ha ha -- I just feel like jogging now! . . . Now I'm done! Not jogging anymore -- back to walking. Just wanted to jog for a little bit there, but now I'm done."

Guess you had to be there.