Photo Credit: Jstsrathdee on Flickr

I knew a guy in college whose mouth operated approximately 2.5 seconds ahead of his brain. It's like they were in different time zones or something, the way he always thought of the right thing to say after his lips had already crossed the line. You can imagine how a head observing standard time with a mouth motoring on daylight savings would pose constant challenges. Even if the listener hadn't yet realized he or she was being insulted, my friend would inadvertently point it out. His only strategy for making up the time lag was to simply "fall back" — He'd lose all color in his guilt-ridden face and excuse his blunder by stopping short to say, "no offense."

Here's an example: This guy was a pseudo frat-boy type who wore khaki pants and buttoned shirts. He'd lined up a gig during the semester break with a company that set up circus-sized tents for outdoor events. He lived in Georgia, but was assigned to work some big to-do next door in Alabama. His employer had arranged a ride for him on the rig that was hauling all the stuff there from Atlanta.

The truck was operated by a husband and wife team who spent most of their time on the road. They didn't mind having a passenger — To them, they had a like-minded stranger to share the last few hours of a long journey home. They attempted to entertain their new friend with a comedy routine called, "Wait, Wait, I've Got Another Vile Joke". Feeling horribly trapped and anxious about how to react to their offensive slurs, my friend thought a funny of his own taste might change the tone. His mouth launched in to an old stand-by...

"So a Frenchman, and Englishman, and an Alabama redneck walk into a bar," he begins. Count two and a half Mississippis, and you know the exact amount of time it took for his thought process to catch up his mouth. He sat slack-jawed and frozen with his stare fixed on the dash sticker that read: "I killed a 12-pack just to watch it die." The driver and his wife were non-plussed, listening intently for the next line in the knee-slapper about those old rednecks they wanted to skewer too. But my friend had already time-shifted. He looked the driver in the eye and said sheepishly, "Oh never mind, man. No offense."

I'm reminded of that story because of my experience at the grocery store last night. I loaded my items on the conveyor while the cashier finished a discussion with her neighbor. Something about a man-stealing bi-atch who must be good at you-know-what, because whomever "he" is couldn't possibly like her for her looks.

"She looks like one of them little ratty dogs dressed up in frou-frou sunglasses," said the cashier, an apparent authority on what's beautiful. If her bleached and permed hairstyle stolen from the pages of my high school yearbook is the litmus test, then I'd say she knows what she's talking about. That's what I was thinking about when she looked over to see that I was ready to check out. But her mind was still on the last thing she said. For some reason her expression wilted like someone who'd just been caught telling a Pollack joke in Krakow. She looked at me apologetically and said, "no offense."

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