I accompany my girlfriend to the grocery store to purchase ingredients for a family dinner the following evening. My head pounds from the effects of the twelve or so beers that I consumed the night before, and I sip on a large, iced coffee with a double shot of espresso and wait anxiously for the caffeine and the four painkillers (OTC, unfortunately) to kick in and raise my spirits. I shuffle through the first set of automatic doors and pause momentarily in the lobby to wait as my girlfriend loads a case of Lipton iced tea, on sale for the time-being, into our roomy cart. An elderly woman directly behind us who emits a musty odor sighs audibly and tells us to hurry up. In response, I ask the woman to relax and enjoy her Saturday. She asks, to no one in particular, "How rude can you be?" Before my girlfriend can reply, I decide to answer her rhetorical question with a response that surprises me because of its direct and uninhibited nature. Looking at the woman, I state, "You're a cunt." The woman assumes these three simple words are the pinnacle of my supposed "rudeness," so she mutters something in a dazed, defeated tone about getting a manager and retreats to aisle five, the sauce aisle. Rather than congratulate me on the compelling nature of my unanimous victory in the debate with the elderly woman, my girlfriend opts to rush toward the dairy aisle and asks/tells me to find another ride home. Confused, I head in the opposite direction and contemplate her failure to appreciate the complete awesomeness of my response to impatient woman's nagging.
I could have called the woman a vagina or a snatch or any other myriad of terms for a woman's genitalia, but I definitely chose the most effective term available. Something about the those four strategically placed letters and that hard K sound never fails to elicit a reaction of pure outrage in women both young and old. But that's a topic for another time. Drinking is said to lessen or even eliminate one's inhibitions; however, I think a good hangover is just as effective. Because of a nagging (not even severe) hangover and an impatient old woman, I completely forgot the 26 years of normal social behavior and etiquette that had been instilled in me. Maybe if everyone had to fulfill all social responsibilities in a hungover state, we would finally be completely honest with one another. On the other hand, maybe I'm just over thinking the whole thing. Regardless, out there somewhere is an old, crotchety bitch telling her bridge buddies about the decline of the youth in this country because of her experience at a Drexel Hill Superfresh and it is my supreme hope that she has to say some variation of the following: "Cunt. He actually called me a cunt!"