I have regrets. But they’re not the kind you might expect. I mean, I married the right person, I finished college, and I have gone 30 years without once attempting to climb Mount Everest (I intend to continue that streak until I die peacefully in my sleep—not horrifically in a YouTube video called “Amateur Climber Accident – WARNING: DEATH”). The regrets I’m talking about don’t happen over the course of a lifetime, they happen instantaneously. It’s a little phenomenon I like to call InstaRegret. Like, say, when you’re window shopping with Wife, and something catches her eye – e.g. the diamond quilt – and you walk into the boutique and realize the only other person in the store is the owner who seems way, way too happy to see you, and you suddenly feel like a Hobbit in a tunnel who is just beginning to notice that the tunnel has lots of spider webs. Like, more spider webs than a Hobbit-friendly tunnel should typically have. That’s InstaRegret. Or, when you ask the hostess if there’s a table with a view of the water, and, since she’s a hostess working the lunch-rush in a pizza restaurant and you’re a guy asking for a nicer table during the lunch-rush in a pizza restaurant, she hates you and seats you in a shared booth next to a couple of giant man-eating spiders. Big time InstaRegret. The only thing worse than InstaRegret is pre-InstaRegret. Like when you’re standing in line at Subway and you lock eyes with the Sandwich Artist and you both know that what is about to happen will be embarrassing for both of you. Embarrassing for you because no Plimoth Plantation Cornucopia of Spinach, Cucumbers, Lettuce, Green Peppers, and Tomatoes is going to make your steak & cheese sub a responsible decision. And embarrassing for the Sandwich Artist because he only had three more credits to go until graduation, but fell into a bad group of wolf spiders, started dealing and smoking web, and failed out of school. Textbook pre-InstaRegret. So what’s the moral of the story? Stay indoors, avoid all human contact, and you probably won’t be eaten by mutant spiders. Probably.
Nailsbails 