It was some time in 2008, I think, maybe 2009.
I was in high school, working at a movie theater at the time. It was a family vacation. It was a nice time - Wyoming is beautiful country, and even the air smelled fresher.
We hiked and saw the sights - Yellowstone and the Grand Tetons, wandering around Jackson Hole. It was June, and it felt insane to see snow, even on a mountain, but there it was! A big old snowbank, melting and packed down. I hit my sister with a snowball or two, and that was my first experience at throwing a snowball at all.
One night for dinner, we went to a restaurant, as one does on vacation, since you’re not gonna be doing much cooking at a hotel. I had a burger or something - it was largely unmemorable. What was memorable was my trip to the bathroom.
Not because of anything I did, mind you - everything went normally for me.
The person having a decidedly not normal time was throwing up into the sink, trying to wash it down or fish bits out to throw in the trash. It was a disgusting sight, but as someone who has had to carry a shallow bowl full of child vomit through a busy restaurant, I know sometimes ya gotta do whatcha gotta do. It probably wouldn’t have stuck with me if he hadn’t turned and said something to me.
“Don’t order the shrimp.”
Mother fucker, what? Of course not! We’re in Wyoming! It’d be one thing to order trout or bass or some other freshwater fish. If they had crawfish, yeah, that probably could have been good if you really needed shellfish.
But shrimp? Good sir, I don’t believe there’s been a variety of shrimp that humans would enjoy in Wyoming in literal eons. The last time something resembling the oceanic shrimp you ordered was in Wyoming was probably the damned Triassic Period! You are two hundred and fifty million years late to fresh shrimp in Wyoming!
These are not thoughts I had as I saw this poor sap dealing with a sink full of his own dinner. At the time, I was enough into paleontology to have much of this information and put it together, but l’esprit de l’escalier struck, and it fell to me to harbor them in my mind for well over a decade before I decided to catalog his wisdom, attained through hardship and spoken with certainty, and my reaction thereby.