The second fall had basically the same dynamics. I was riding on the bicycle trail on Santa Monica beach on a Saturday afternoon, always a terrible idea because, even though there's a parallel, equally nice cement path for foot traffic, everybody goes on the bike path. Bicycles, roller-bladers, skateboarders, and pedestrians. But I ended up on the trail by accident on the way home from a ride up the streets and hills of Pacific Palisades, and I was admiring a woman sunning herself on a bench in the sand when I looked forward and saw a mountain on the path in front of me. Fortunately I wasn't going too terribly fast. I grabbed the brakes, slowed almost to a halt, and just like the Ford Pinto scene in Top Secret, ever-so-gently tapped the mountain, which was in fact an enormously tall and wide black man carrying a lawn chair under each arm. I thus came to a complete halt and then, as one does when one is on a bicycle but not moving in any direction, keeled over. The man I had hit turned around with a "what are you doing you crazy white child" look on his face and as I got up I pointed in the general direction of the bench, but I had been riding looking over my shoulder for so long that it was at least thirty yards back and indistinguishable from the beach crowd, and explained, "There was a woman. On the bench."

He shook his head, muttered something, and kept going. He hadn't even dropped the chairs when I hit him.

The third fall, and the only one involving injuries, happened riding home in the rain here in Seattle. I was on a narrow two-lane road, a bit before dusk, and a car was, at least in car vs bicycle terms, tailgating me. I knew some diagonal railroad tracks were coming up, and I kept looking over my shoulder, but then the tracks were in front of me and my brain locked up and I couldn't brake to a halt and I couldn't swerve towards the centerline so as to take the tracks squarly so I just kept going and then my bicycle wasn't underneath me any more and I was on the pavement sliding forward on my thigh and forearms. It didn't hurt much, and when I stopped moving I did a quick systems check, got up, walked twenty or thirty feet back to my bicycle, picked it up, gave a dirty look to the tailgater that had at last given me some room. After the backup of cars had cleared I rode home. Thanks to gloves and a full-sleeve jacket, I didn't lose hardly any skin. I had a lump on my elbow for about six months, and my shoulder still pops every time I make a full circle backwards.

This afternoon, riding home from a short visit to the office, grumpy because of the second dessert sitting uneasily in my stomach and also because of the headwind (both directions!) and the light rain combining with the sunshine to hinder visibility, I had another incident. At a busy intersection downtown (7th and Pike) a bunch of pedestrians were crossing the street against the light. Against traffic, of which I was the only member. I picked out a gap in the stream, cruised through, started to turn left, realized I should check for oncoming traffic, looked up, found some, tried to brake with my left hand while making a signal with my right arm to the car, which was itself turning right. Pure telepathy would have allowed us to coordinate our actions safely, but lacking both telepathy and right-of-way I instead reached across my body with my right arm in an attempt to communicate to the driver that I apologized for the intrusion but wished her or him to either rapidly accelerate through the turn or to stop completely, but under no circumstances to proceed slowly while showing concern for my welfare because, given my more limited options, that would be the one course of action leading inevitably to collision. This leftward reaching with the right arm apparently caused my left arm move sympathetically, turning the handlebars sharply to the left, and I found that the rear part of the bicycle was now airborne. I then completed a maneuver of which I have no clear recollection, at the end of which I was crouched on both feet on the pavement, nominally still standing, and holding some part of my bicycle behind me with my left hand, the fingers of which were smarting. I don't believe I came within ten feet of the car, which disappeared. I picked up my bicycle, walked to the corner of the intersection, straightened the handlebars, waited for traffic to clear, and got back underway. As per the rules of sumo, since no part of my body other than feet touched the ground and I did not step outside the ring, I do not consider this a fall, and my record thus remains, three falls in eight years, one with casualties.

And please don't point to jubilant Iraqis dancing in the streets to validate the case for "pre-emptive liberation." You'd be doing the Baghdad Bugaloo too if the murderous tyrant who'd been eating off golden plates while your family starved finally got what was coming to him. It in no way proves that running roughshod over international law and pouring Iraqi oil -- now brought to you by the good folks at Halliburton -- onto the flames of anti-American hatred was a good idea. It wasn't before the war, and it still isn't now. The unintended consequences have barely begun to unfold.