Column - Supermarket Soap Opera

Supermarket Soap Opera
Oy…. Supermarkets. There’s nothin’ like standing in the express lane with a lot of other people in front of you and the bastard at the front of the line is writing a check and they don’t have a check card and yadda yadda yadda it takes forever. It’s like the equivalent to being behind a school bus in the morning. It’s the soap opera of daily life among your average joe shmoe. It’s a place (along with laundromats) where all the women’s magazines claim you can meet attractive men, but I’ve been going to both my whole adult life and know this to be a crappy lie. Because I’ve actually believed this I’ve gone to the store in a cocktail dress with my hair teased to the moon and wearing bright red lipstick only to find other women dressed the same way. If I could get away with it I’d prefer to go at 10pm in my filthy bathrobe and house slippers but don’t want to risk it just in case the stupid magazine is right. I basically prefer to live life in my bathrobe. Believe it or not, I’ve actually walked two blocks to the deli for the Sunday paper in by pajamas and bathrobe. Why should the senile lady down the street (who keeps forgetting where she lives) have all the fun? If she can get away with why not me? She’ll walk in a circle around my block for hours in her bathrobe and slippers before I finally yell out, “Ya missed it again, Edna!!” It's my only form of entertainment these days.
I think the biggest mistake most women make in trying to meet the man of their dreams at the Supermarket is that they hang around the gourmet food or the imported espresso aisle when they really should be in the beer and pork rinds aisle. There’s got to be one guy out there that buys that stuff. Hell, I don’t even buy that stuff. Somehow the Cinderella tale just doesn’t sound as good when referring to her Knight in greasy Pork Rinds, though.
One thing that bugs me to death is the laundry detergent situation. They all claim to magically lift stains off of clothes. I’m talking tomato sauce, mud, tar, and blood. First of all if my shirt was covered with blood stains I don’t think my first thought would be “Now which product will get out these nasty stains?” I think I’d be thinking about the stab wound that’s currently putting those stains there in the first place. The only time I’d be worrying about blood stain removing is if I just killed someone myself and needed to clean away the evidence. In that case burning the damn shirt would be best rather than shopping for detergent. I mean, Christ, you just killed someone – is the shirt really that important that you’d want to keep it? (I can’t tell you how many cop shows I’ve watched where the murderer was caught throwing his bloody clothes, sneakers and all, into the washer.) What the hell?!
The last time I went to the market I must have had a sign on my forehead that said, “If you’re really weird please come up to me and start a conversation.” As I was walking down one aisle I notice a man with about 20 of those gallon containers of water in his cart and he was still putting more in. He looks at me and very psychotically says, “I’m going to take a bath tonight.” So I “s-l-o-w-l-y” back out of the aisle nodding my head trying not to make any sudden movements lest he whip out a bazooka and blow me away right into the tampon section. I don’t think I’d like that written in my obituary in the local paper. “Carol ****, aged 36, dies amongst a pile of extra absorbent tampax after taking a bullet to the chest region from a man wanting a bath.” What a way to go. After this little fiasco I find myself in the fish section next to the lobster tank. It is so full with lobsters that they are crushing each other. So the woman next to me starts sounding off about how inhumane that is and someone should call the SPCA on these people for overcrowding these poor little things. She’s got me half convinced when I snap out of it and tell her their sole purpose for being in there to begin with is so someone can buy them to kill them and eat them. She gave me this horrid look like I was taking the last package of Oreos in the store.
Did you ever go on the “20 items or less express lane” with one item and start counting the items in the cart of the person in front of you and mentally start bitchin’ to yourself about the fact that they really have 24 items and who the hell do they think they are anyways? Oh, c’mon, admit it - we all do it. Just as sure as another day when we mentally convince ourselves we can go onto that lane ourselves because 25 cans of green beans should be counted as one item because it’s the same product never mind the fact that it’s in 25 separate cans. Oh, and of course, when we turn around to see the woman with one item behind us mentally counting all those cans of green beans we give her a dirty look that says, “Step off, lady”. (smirk)