Regrets and Missed Opportunities

It’s almost certainly impossible to live an entire life without regrets. It’s debatable whether it’s brave and clear-sighted or foolish and obtuse even to try. And it probably goes without saying that those thousands of minutes spent writing silly, pointless commentary on the internet—instead of, say, reading a book, breathing fresh air, or engaging real flesh-and-blood humans in conversation—are such ripe sources for a flood of regrets that any single missed opportunity is hardly worth mentioning.

One or our most stinging regrets, however, is that we finished writing a zombie-themed post about Eddie Van Halen only days before being shown this picture of Al Davis, owner of the National Football League’s Oakland Raiders and soulless demon of a million children’s darkest dreams:

We don’t know where this image came from or whether it’s been manipulated in Photoshop, because we’re a little too freaked out by it to look very closely. But our job here is not to uncover the truth about creepy photos; our job is to make dumb jokes about sad people who look like the undead, and, frankly, we blew it by running with the Van Halen thing instead of waiting just a bit longer for Al Davis to lunge at us out of the shadows, grasping at our throats with his papery fingers. We think it’s true that “Regret is insight that comes a day too late”¹—in this case, two days. 

NOTES

1. Northrop Frye, influential literary critic and theorist who we’d never heard of before today, 1912–1991.