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YouStabbedMyMotherInTheArm!/DouglasSBenson1
 You probably have a list of your own:
Things I Shouldn't Have Said.
My listhas a different title:
Things I Shouldn't Have Gotten Away With Saying.
 This these are not intentional slights or meanness. Sometimes words justslip out on their own.The summer after our freshman year in college, Ben K and I went to New  York City for a vacation. I don't remember why we decided to go there, but we had a great time wandering around SoHo and Greenwich Village day and night, seeing museums and Big Apple weirdness. I remember a coupleof things very vividly about that trip. One was a nightly battle with Gray Booger Syndrome. If you've ever been in a polluted city during atemperature inversion, you're probably familiar with GBS.I don't remember what the other thing was. It was a long time ago.One late afternoon, while walking around the downtown streets feeling likeants at the feet of giant stone monuments, B and I stopped in front of aclosed science fiction bookstore. It was full of Star Trek and Star Wars andStar This That and The Other paraphernalia and movie posters and gore-dripping comic books and Fangoria magazines. Perfect place for the two of us. I'd say there was a life-sized Yoda mask in the window, but although Ienjoy Star Wars as much as the next eternal adolescent I'm aware that it isa work of fiction, and that creatures such as Yoda do not actually exist andtherefore masks of them cannot really be described as "life-sized."See what I mean? Perfect place for us. At this point, Ben and I were just resting in front of the store as theafternoon shadows crept down the sidewalk, when two oddly-dressed women sidled up to us and stopped. They were painfully thin, with nomakeup but long metal ear foliage and jangling metal wrist wrings. Wearing some sort of rumpled black gowns, their long straight hair wasdull and trickled down their backs, and they carried stacks of pamphletsadvertising one of those cults that seem to pop into the publicconsciousness every so often when the members start killing themselves off 
 
YouStabbedMyMotherInTheArm!/DouglasSBenson2
 with spiked Kool-Aid in order to ride imaginary spaceships to Valhalla."I see you're interested in other worlds," said one of the space vixens."I see you're interested in my d**k," I returned.I shouldn't have said that, of course. And as it turned out, I didn't. Actually,I said it, but I said it to Ben as the women wandered off in disappointmentthat we didn't take them up on their offer of attending their 6 PM prayercircle."You've never seen anything until you've been with 100 of us in a circle of love, chanting the Pramaloona Pooka Pooh." Ah, life's little regrets.I could have written that anecdote in such a way that I actually said those words, but it would have been a mean thing to do, and I'm not a mean guy,not way down deep where it really counts. And besides, it would have beena lie, and I want you to trust me because what happened later that nightactually happened the way I'm about to relate. I'd be tempted to doubt itmyself, but Ben K was there and he'll back me up. We had left my Uncle Al's apartment, where we were staying during ourtrip, to walk around the city for the evening. We'd heard of a great place tohave pizza in Greenwich Village and we wandered in. The place was packedon a Saturday night, and after a long wait we grabbed a small round tableand ordered a large pizza. Usually a large pizza is about right for twohungry college guys, but the enormous pepperoni-covered wagon wheelthat arrived at our tiny table would have been enough to stuff a Paraguayanlion tamer, some Irish coal miners and a couple of Trappist monks. Thepizza was larger than the tabletop—in essence, the pizza
became
thetabletop—and we tried to avoid the eyes of any potentially amused New  Yorkers as we carefully ate from opposite ends of the pizza so as tomaintain the precarious table-pizza balance and avoid tipping everythingover.
 
YouStabbedMyMotherInTheArm!/DouglasSBenson3
 We were embarrassed about ordering a pizza large enough to weigh anchorand sail to New Jersey on a sea of its own tomato sauce, so we had themcrate up the remains and we hauled the leftovers out with us. By the time we reached the street it was close to midnight, the witching hour. Thestreets were thick with people walking and talking, some to each other andsome to themselves.Today it can be hard to tell an autoverbalist from someone talking on a cellphone earpiece, but back then the crazies were much more clear.
Can youhear me now, invisible voices? 
There were quite a few homeless peoplesitting on the sidewalk, holding up the storefronts with their backs, beggingfor change. We donated our pizza box to alleviate world hunger and walkedon down the street.Out of nowhere, a frighteningly huge and disheveled man leapt up at us outof the darkness, poked his finger straight in my chest, glared down at me with wide, wild eyes, and yelled at the top of his lungs, "I KNOW YOU! IKNOW YOU!"YOU STABBED MY MOTHER IN THE ARM!!!"Our hearts stopped beating--our brains went into shock and four legs froze."YOU STABBED MY MOTHER IN THE ARM!!!" he yelled again. Without thinking or missing a beat I yelled back, "I'm sorry--I didn't know she was your mother!!!" A miracle of comic timing, wasted on the insane.There are moments of absolute clarity, and apparently there are momentsof absolute unclarity. Luckily for us, the former instantly followed thelatter: Ben and I looked at each other and yelled, "Aaaugh!" and startedrunning, continuing far down the street until we were sure we weren't being pursued by a nightmarish horde of pizza-wielding lunatics. Another critical moment leaps to mind, a moment of unclarity when I saidsomething that could have gotten me smashed into a small pulpy lump. My 
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