My mouth said Hobba Lobba Da.
My acquaintance -- passing me in the mall -- was a little confused. I just kept walking. Once you throw something like that at a person, there's no recovery. Just keep on trucking.
Recently, I did it again.
This time, it was only a word, just one goddamn word, that changed everything. One wrong word caused so much more damage than an innocent little Hobba Lobba Da.
In my gardening column for Charleston's Post and Courier, I wrote about Japanese beetles. They're an invasive species that causes oodles of damage on trees and shrubs. Here's what happened.
My brain wrote: "They eat everything, especially roses."
My stupid fingers wrote: "They eat everything, except roses."
Ouch.
There's no taking that back. There's no stopping my friend in the mall and saying, "Oh, hey, Carl... yeah, sorry about that weird thing I just said, I don't know what happened. Maybe I'm having a stroke. Anyway, what I MEANT to say was Japanese beetles eat everything ESPECIALLY ROSES!!!!!!"
No, I wrote it and now it's out there. Forever and ever.
Those in the know, horticulturists and such, will read it. They'll laugh, cut my picture out, and throw dirt at my dumb face because everyone, EVERYONE, knows that Japanese beetles LOVE ROSES!!!!!!!!!!!
So I'll run an explanation in my next column. I'll tell my readers that I had a stroke and that things are okay now.
And then I'll write that the world is flat.
Ouch! Thank God, I did not catch your latest column! ;-)
ReplyDeleteA while back, I planted a new tree in my yard, a lovely 'Kousa' Dogwood; my neighbor came to ask me what kind of tree I had just finished planting and I started a long speech on 'Kousa' Crape Myrtle for like, ten minutes. I only realized my mistake way later after the neighbor had run off and I never dared go back to him to say: "Oh, by the way, the whole time I was saying Crepe Myrtle, I meant Dogwood...." The good thing is that the tree never did well, and after a couple of years, I removed it.
No one knows what kind of tree was there!
PS: I am waiting for your column on how to deal with stink bugs...