There are no mistakes
only happy accidents
Bob Ross
What we’ve got here is the absolute American catastrophe rendered in one perfect frozen moment, a car smashed against railroad tracks like some kind of sculptural fuck you to manifest destiny itself. And there, in the foreground, is Sharka, the Portuguese Water Dog who clearly gives zero shits about this tableau of human failure, because she understands what we’ve spent centuries forgetting: none of this twisted metal means shit.
Sharka’s just there, present in a way the wrecked car can’t be anymore, occupying space with the kind of quiet dignity that makes you realize the whole human enterprise of velocity and destination is fundamentally ridiculous. While we’re busy creating wreckage, literal and metaphorical, this magnificent creature is simply being, which is apparently too much to ask of our species.
The Pacific Coast Highway running parallel to those tracks, Davenport in the background like a ghost town that never got the memo it was supposed to die properly, this is the landscape that doesn’t make it into the brochures. No sunset golden hour bullshit, just gray concrete, twisted chrome, and one superior animal who’s witnessed this particular flavor of stupidity before.
That Bob Ross quote: “there are no mistakes, only happy accidents”, it lands different with Sharka in frame. Because yeah, maybe the crash was just physics meeting hubris, but the dog? The dog’s no accident. The dog’s the only intentional thing here, the only element operating on instinct and truth rather than the delusion that we can outrun consequence.
This is America eating itself while the dogs watch, bewildered and bemused, wondering when we’ll learn.