What the hell just happened?

“In a way, I kind of wish something had gone wrong at my wedding,” she said. “It seems like all my friends have great stories about awful things that happened at their weddings and I've got nothing.”

Catherine sat across from me on the train. She's been married to the same guy for 20 years -- happily, she said; but she still regrets that they didn't have to bail the best man out of jail, and that nobody puked on her wedding dress and no one got caught groping the groom's younger sister in the cloak room.

She was traveling on business with Keith, another member of her company.

Keith mentioned that he'd recently been bitten by a brown recluse spider. First, the bite had turned red, then purple. By the time he went to the doctor, the flesh around the bite had begun to turn brown and die. Even after the doctor finished cleaning it up, it looked really disgusting.

In fact, he said, the area around the bite looked so spectacularly nasty that he decided to show the damage only to his best friend at work. But before the end of the day, people were practically lined up outside his cubicle wanting a peek at his nasty, putrefying flesh. Now that he's healed, he's known as Spiderman and his co-workers want to know how he can sleep in his apartment, knowing the spider could still be there.

Personal crises, bumps, bruises, and amputations seem to be life's way of pulling us out of the audience and putting us on stage.

Inertia is a powerful force in my work as a bureaucrat. It's easy to go with the flow, take things as they come, and let things fester that have been festering for years; but that can get really, really dull. A couple of weeks ago I discovered a great short-term project that (in my opinion), would save a lot of money and benefit everybody --a classic win-win deal. But in order to do it, I had to sell it to the County Council in a public meeting at a time when we're transitioning to a new form of government and half of the council's members are campaigning for re-election and the other half are limping and quacking.

As a young man growing up in a small Midwestern town, I remember being counseled on the importance of humility. “It's the nail that sticks out that gets hammered,” the adage went.

I opened my presentation to the Council by saying, “This item really should have been on the consent agenda.” It's been a long time since I got that big a laugh out of a group of elected officials. 

In keeping with procedure, I produced the obligatory singing dog and dancing pony, then brought in some department heads and subject matter experts for a half-hour of back-and-forth and up-and-down with Council members. After deliberating for a while, the Council came to a conclusion on a split vote and gave me direction. As I stepped out of the hearing room into the fresh air, one of the people who'd worked with me on the project asked, in a voice that was a little louder than it was judicious, “What the hell just happened in there?”

The answer is obvious: Amid the pain and collateral damage, a story happened in there.

Every story has to have a protagonist and an antagonist. Each has to have something at stake and there has to be a conflict – both sides can't get everything they want.

The conflict might be between a prissy mother of the bride and a randy aunt, the bride and the groom's drunken frat house buddy who can't hang onto his lunch during the wedding march, an individual fighting forces of nature or a political candidate who needs to make a headline and a bureaucrat convinced that his motives are pure and intelligence perfect.

Along the way, things have to go wrong and the protagonist can never see the worst of it coming. No one worthy of being a protagonist ever sets out to lose.

At the end of the struggle, somebody wins and somebody loses – or everybody loses. (Everybody can't win, that's one of the rules of storytelling.)

And when the smoke clears after the climactic battle, justice has been served or tragedy has triumphed; and we have learned a new survival skill – whether it's the importance of getting medical care for a spider bite, the advisability of requiring groomsmen to take a breathalyzer test, or the consequences of saying “this will improve code enforcement” to a group of libertarian politicians. But we don't love stories because they teach us, we love them because they entertain us and excite our emotions.

We are all grateful that catastrophic disasters and sanity-threatening traumas are rare, but we should be equally grateful for the weird, bruising, embarrassing, and unexpected day-to-day events that season our lives.

Life must be awfully dull for the nails that never get hammered.