Don’t you wish that sometimes you really could stick your foot in your mouth, if for no other reason than to just shut you up long enough to think about what you’re going to say?
For me at least, a shoe in the throat would not be such a bad idea. I actually know a guy who ate a converse tennis shoe on a dare.
It took him four days, but he digested it, sole and all.
It was probably a really stupid thing to do, but it did keep him from talking – a sizable feat to say the least.
For the most part, an ill-timed comment can be at least explained or forgiven, but occasionally something so rancid and so incredibly insensitive will escape your mouth and infect all that hear it that nothing can be done to undo it.
I can think of many examples. Trent Lott alone could provide a text book of examples on this topic. Bush has a few I can think of, and I have a list of my own that I’m reluctant to mention due to its length.
And perhaps what is worse is the realization that you’re an insensitive, stupid jackass.
Because after that realization you are very aware, at least for a while, of everything that comes from your mouth.
Sure, you may catch the comment before it spills out on to the audible air, but then what do you do with all of those comments that are building right behind your tongue.
Ideally, you would save them for someone who truly deserves such filth, but more often than not the load gets so great that the slim oozes from your mouth without control one night after three Glenlivets on the rocks to someone who just happened to sit down next to you and smile.
Do you hear that? The silence that occurs only right before you say the stupidest thing imaginable.
I suppose I’ll start with the shoe laces, twist them up around a fork and swallow them whole.
It’s strange-these moments that I can still recollect.
I remember being very young, swimming in the kiddie pool at a country club, and talking to a young mother while she watched her son who was younger than I.
I thought, since she and I were the only “adults” in the pool, I should make conversation. Instead, I told her, “I’m gonna go urinate,” as if it were the sensible most mature thing to say. I remember her face – baffled, confused, disgusted.
I went into the boy’s room and did not return to the pool for hours, until I was confident the young mother and her son had gone.
Surely, relative to other moments like this one had come with little consequence, but too many others have had drastic repercussions.
I’m sorry. I think I’ll go and eat a shoe.
Jay is secretly a ninja. Contact him at [email protected]