Another weekend at Niagara Falls with my girlfriend. We did more touristy things. A casino. A huge outdoor mall. Fireworks over the falls at dusk. Dinner at Rainforest Café with gorillas that are supposed to make noises and move. They didn’t move. Closed for maintenance. I guess it takes a lot of maintenance to make fake gorillas move.

We also visited an indoor waterpark. I like waterparks. Probably seems counterintuitive for someone with contamination OCD to enjoy waterparks swarming with kids, tourists, germs and such. Something about being immersed in water seems clean to me. Splashing around. Water flowing everywhere. Down the drains with the old, out the top of a slide with the new, fresh and pure. Or so it seems in my mind anyway.

We’d tackled all the slides and were relaxing, proud of our accomplishments, by kicking around in the wave pool. We’d only been in five minutes when, tweeeet!!! A whistle. A lifeguard calling out, wearily, “everyone out of the pool.”

All of the bathers kicked themselves back to the shallow end and got out. We looked around. No sense of urgency. The lifeguards put out a sign and waited. Eventually one emerged from the back with a hand-held skimmer and waded into the pool. That was when I noticed what was floating around him. I felt my skin crawl and groaned inwardly.

Things go wrong. Things break down. Bowels. Brains. Mechanical gorillas. You have to face up to the fact that, literally, s@#t happens, and you deal with it the only way you can: with maturity and self-assurance.

“Honey,” I said, turning to my girlfriend. “I think we should take a thousand showers and sprint to the car.”

There’s a pool where I work. They put up a sign when things like that happen that announces a “Biological Accident” has closed the pool. Only momentarily though! Don’t fret, folks!

I think I’d rather they didn’t put up the sign. Why bother? Everyone knows what a biological accident is in a swimming pool. It’s not like people see a sign like that and think, “Hmm, do you think they discovered penicillin in there? Maybe an unexpected conception, how lovely!”

Can’t say I’ll never go to that waterpark again. But I think I’d look forward to the Rainforest Café more, whether or not the gorillas are broken. At least that is a completely non-biological accident.