How To Fit Your Foot In Your Mouth
A lesson on holding your tongue
The words slipped out of my mouth like a slobbering dog. Which was quite incredible really, considering that I had just managed to shove my entire size 13 foot right up in there.
Perfect fit.
There they were, standing in the puddle, smiling, cooing at one another. Kissing each other with their eyes while they washed their feet with the speed of a grass seed finding it’s way out of the shell. And I was a tyrant, staring at them like a ravenous fucking dog, impatiently waiting for my turn at the watering trough.
Perhaps it was the cocktail of drugs I consumed during the Bassnectar concert, or maybe that half pint of Jim Beam I swallowed on the muddy march back from the Moonshine Stage that turned me into an impatient asshole.
Please god, just this once, let me blame it on the inebriation.
And then it happened…
“You know your feet are just gonna get dirty again?” I said.
They stared up at me, emotionless, as if to say, “hello asshole!” But no words came from their mouths.
And I received their punishment of silence as their eyes ripped the Grinch heart from my chest. I wanted to kill myself right there in line or at the very least cut the tongue from my huge foot filled mouth and stomp it into the mud in front of them as an apology and to show my shame.
And now, 10 years later, I am still tortured by this moment.
I silently wonder if this wasn’t the most god awful case of foot in the mouth the world has ever seen and perhaps Guinness is just waiting for me to call in and claim my prize.
Then they’ll visit my house in good ol’ Somewhere, IL with a humongous check as big as my front door and they’ll bring along the film crew and the happy ass interviewer who will prod me with questions about the size of my feet and the width of my mouth and beg for a demonstration right there on the front porch while the world watches from the comfort of their homes.
And soon enough I’ll be asked on to Jimmy Kimmel and he’ll have a coffee mug waiting for me on his desk with a tiny picture of a foot on it as a joke that I will take as a personal threat and start screaming at him in front of the studio audience, but because everyone’s been so desensitized to the ridiculousness of late-night television they will all think it’s some silly skit and they will laugh and I will cry until the commercial break.
But then I wonder if maybe this is the punishment. This memory. This feeling of insufferable shame that remains with me 10 years on.
Or maybe it’s not a punishment so much as a scar. A deep, scabbed over wound that you slowly run your big finger over every now and then while you lay in bed in the darkness remembering the moment you were wounded.
And you can see every detail as if you were laying on the living room floor watching a home movie with your parents and explaining every detail of the film as families are known to do.
Just like you remember how you got the ironed over scar under your forearm where that rock-sharpened stick you fashioned into a sword to fight your brothers punctured your flesh and bled you like a bullet wound in a Tarantino film.
That’s the scar you share around the campfire. That’s the scar that shows your bravado and charisma and strength as a man.
But this scar you keep to yourself. This scar you never share because it reveals your impatience and intolerance and your capacity to destroy love.
And every now and then as you lay in bed in the darkness you revisit the scar with your big finger, feeling the crease in your flesh and playing the moment back in your mind like a movie, wondering if it might ever disappear, even though deep down you know a scar never fades.
Just like the puncture wound, you’ll wear this scar to the grave.
And sure, you won’t proudly show it to your friends on those drunken campfire nights, but just the same, you’ll never forget the lesson of that moment.
Or the taste of your foot…
