rekkidblogga

Shop 'til you drop

My mom sent me to the grocery store the other night with this list:

One bunch tomatoes
One pack choc. donuts
Chicken
One box bandages
One box candy
One small pack beef bologna
Two bananas
One small box soda crackers
Milk - 2%
One box Pinwheel cookies

Yeah. I'm not kidding. The only things on the list that were for me were the tomatoes, chicken, band-aids and milk (my mom is lactose-intolerant). Otherwise, that's all her.

Pushing the cart through the aisles as songs I remember being cool during my college days serenaded my search - and let me interject here to say that you indeed know you're getting old when you hear The Sundays being played over the supermarket Muzak in the produce section - I felt my face redden at the thought that eventually I'd have to take all this junk up to the checker in order to escape the confines of Where Shopping Is A Pleasure. So embarrassing when the clerk scans your stuff and gives you a not-so-surreptitious look that says "You keep eating like this and you're gonna die."

And so I added a few healthy items to the basket - trail mix, water, salad in a bag, those protein shakes I've grown to like - but it was a little like using a squirt bottle to try putting out a roaring brushfire. How lame my box of protein shakes looked, sidled up against that bag of 16 Softees chocolate donuts and a sleek deli-pak of Oscar Mayer 100% Beef Bologna ("No fillers!"). Despite its shiny silver packaging it simply couldn't compete with good old American Death Snacks. It was too wholesome, too full of vitamins and minerals.

Oh no. Checkout time. My hands trembling as I hastily placed the items on the conveyor belt, I fretted over when I'd get The Look. Maybe I should hide behind the newer, glossier TV Guide this time or attempt to screen out the "You gonna die" glance by tossing in an Archie's Pals 'N' Gals booklet at the last minute so that I'd instead garner a "You so crazy" look, which would still be mortifying but somehow less shameful in a personal way. At least with Archie you're rotting your brain, not your arteries.

"Any coupons?" the checker, a lady in her early 50s said, not bothering to look up from the register as she totaled up my order. No, I replied, handing her my check and ID. She glanced at it, handed it back, finished bagging my sad, shameful array of suicide via preservatives and told me to have a nice day without batting an eye.

She made no judgments. A veteran, she'd been through the wars.

posted by rekkidbraka @ 11:32 AM