#44 of 92: The Potato Salad’s Gone Bad and Other Miseries

What’s a time you ignored your gut — and paid for it?

View all responses

You can’t answer a question like this without hurting somebody’s feelings. Unless you’re talking about eating the potato salad that you know is bad because it was left out on the backyard picnic table all afternoon. But it looked so good, so perfectly creamy that you couldn’t imagine that it was bad, it being bad being a betrayal of all your desires but not of your instincts.

Anyway.

I am trying to think of happy and clever times that I ignored my gut and ended up paying for it. But those times were anything but happy and clever and were, instead, messy and conflicted. 

There have been dozens of those times, but they all involve people who are either dead and can’t defend themselves or alive and unwitting. And besides, you don’t want living people to know that you’ve paid some awful price for taking a chance on them or believing what they said to you over, say, a plate of potato salad.

I am in a dark mood because I am sick and also tired. Because I am so rarely sick, having a cold, especially one that lingers for a couple of weeks, feels terminal to me and so I swing into self-pity and believing that my entire life has been one of ignoring my gut and paying the price. Dark begets dark. It’s always that way.

That said, once I bought a used car for $8,000 because I liked its slanted roof and the sporty wooden steering wheel even though I knew the salesman was taking me to the cleaners (my gut told me so), but the car lasted several years so I guess it was a wash.