Grocery stores are weak.

Tuesday, April 13, 2004 

Went to the grocery store near my crib yesterday evening. I'm not a big fan of the place. Some sad bastard is always "working on" their car in the parking lot, taking up two spaces, with tools and parts spread out around and in a couple of shopping carts. I must have grabbed last-week's "tool dolly", because my cart was bent to hell, greased up, and sporting some three-wheel-motion. It would catch-and-lurch, kind of a stutter step, as it squeaked and squawked down the random-tiled aisles. Some dude with a lazy eye, patchy beard, and at least two missing teeth was mysteriously mirroring my movements as I criss-crossed my way through the consumers' habitat. And he would stare me down as we passed one another. Every Aisle. Like fuckin' clockwork.

Eventually, I doubled back so I could stare him down, out of rhythm, on the soup aisle. Plus, I forgot to pick up a couple cans of minestrone (piss off, that shit's good).

Some strange carb-swap occurred on the bread aisle. For reasons unknown (but I'll attribute them to the cultural setting of my neighborhood), all the loaves of BREAD on the BREAD aisle (as marked on the aisle header) had been replaced by bag-stacks of shitty HEB tortillas. Not the freshly made ones mind you, but the ones processed and bagged in some distant place, shipped in the back of someone's pickup truck for three days, dropped on the front porch of my HEB like a morning newspaper, a week earlier. Dirty damn tortillas.

Regardless of the complete lack of tortilla quality at my local grocery, I wanted a loaf of bread. A normal, cheap-ass loaf of Mrs. Baird's would have been fine. But no. Oh no sir. Amongst the virtually empty shelves where bread once thrived on the BREAD aisle, I found three mutated loaves of buttercrust (I prefer this) which had obviously been assaulted by a gang of rabid two-year-olds (as evidenced by the open packaging, size 3-4 footprints, and several slices were missing but not the heals), and two loaves of the rocks-and-twigs bread (pristinely kept, on the highest shelf, out of youngsters' reach and beyond the interest of any human being under the influence of working taste buds). What I call "rocks-and-twigs" bread is really nothing more than pulp-combination of lawn clippings, fish tank rocks, what look like marijuana stems/seeds, and various fruit/nut parts indigestible by birds, formed together in a rude attempt to resemble the standard wheat product we call "bread". For any of you sad souls who sadly *choose* this "product" as your preferred method of couching lunchmeats, I say: at least your colon is clear, you dumbass.

Ah... I feel my rant coming to an end. I feel a weight being lifted from me. I have a sensation of impending relief! I feel pre-purged. Or, maybe that's the "bread" doing its "magic"... 'tis time.