Good morning - did you vote for me?
What's it like being president?
Easier than running a company, with much less financial reward.
How do you feel abut the negative attention?
The only thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about.
Is Hillary that evil?
She tried to eat Barron's head. The Secret Service had to pull her off him. It was a bad time.. a very bad time.
Mr. President, I have one request.
How can I help you, Bob?
My name's Sid.
How can I help you, Sid?
Would you tell the man with the machine gun to remove it from my lumbar region, please?
- A man in Germany is suing his neighbor because he hired him to get his wife pregnant, but failed after 72 times. His neighbor knew he was sterile when he accepted the job.
- Faceyspaces, notorious liars and suckers up and sellers of your information, defends sharing data with phone makers. Reminder: this is regardless of whether you told FB not to share your information.
- Some enterprising lawyer might have a class action suit, but that's just a guess.
It was the end of a busy week and time for a treat: we decided to eat out.
Somehow, in the midst of a treat, I got roped into grocery shopping (the vagaries of marriage). It was decided we'd try the place we call UsedToBe's. You all have one - the place that used to be Adam's, then Susan's, then Fat Bob's.
We pulled up, got out of the car, and POOF - UsedToBe's had turned into IsNoLongers. The restaurant was a case of extreme non-presence. There was only a doctor's office. To make sure they weren't deliberately hiding from us, we verified. As it turns out, doctor's offices are not used to people coming in and verifying they aren't BBQ restaurants. This was the restaurant that started us on BBQ many years ago.
This is yet another case of some person following us around, seeing what we like, and making sure it's not there next time. This extends outside stores too. Just a few weeks back, our current favorite BBQ place went missing. This is number two.
Aggravated beyond reasonable, I went to CostCo. Close to CostCo is a BBQ chain. Hoping against hope that the entire chain hadn't shut down or moved out of state, we were going to eat there. Well, in theory anyway. Some subhuman in a white car cut me off from the entrance. The explosion was felt across the continental United States.
Stuck in CostCo, I began to feel sorry for my poor wife, who had to remain within a twenty foot radius of me at most times. I hate shopping, I'm not fond of people, and there's a special hatred reserved for the Stupid. You know what's coming, right? The Stupid were out in force. The guy in front of me with the Bluetooth earpiece, who sounded like he was having a conversation with someone on the other end of CostCo. Am I the only person left on the planet who can talk on the phone without the rest of the county being forced to listen to it? Then the family with Fat Mom walked by. Unfortunately I heard them long before I saw them. She was talking so loudly, I thought she must be on the phone. But no, the entire cursed family talked like that. Then the people who shouldn't be driving carts, no less cars. The ones who leave their carts smack in the middle of the aisle so you can't get through.
The only reason I allowed myself to be dragged to that store is that they carry sofas and we're desperate for one. I don't mind the current one having my ass print on it; I just mind that my side is several inches lower than the rest of it. So I'm looking around at the sofas, which have strangely morphed into lawn furniture, gazebos (gesundheit), and pink flamingos. I remark to Wife that the sofas looked really nice and comfortable, attempting to contain the nuclear explosion that was gathering steam (and plutonium) internally, when she utters the phrase that will probably become one that repeats often:
Oh, they only carry sofas the winter.
WHAT?
You can only buy sofas in the winter?
I had no idea sofas were seasonal items.
It was like finding out that you can't purchase an air conditioner when it's hot. Apparently this is 'normal' and people just live with it.
Since it's coming up on summer, bathing suits and shorts are starting to disappear. I was not born for this world.
So I asked her why she told me CostCo had nice sofas. She said you can order them online. Ah. I asked if you could sit on them online too. She said no, but remembered which ones she liked. Well, that should be easy to purchase then. Perhaps we can buy our next car that way.
Can't you just feel my temperature rising?
As we're walking around, my wife wants to start 'communicating' with me. I'm having trouble grunting without taking anybody's head off and she wants my opinion on which sneakers look better or how about those scallops. It was then I came up with yet another Brilliant Idea<tm> - pretend I'm not here and the cart is trained to follow you around. That was agreeable to her and she kept that in mind for damn near fifteen seconds before she started asking more questions.
Do you know you can purchase organic fudge pops?
Organic fudge pops. Are they free range too? Nothing but the best for my family.
In the produce walk-in, where the employees are wearing winter coats, Wife picks up some romaine. I like romaine because apparently they rip the hearts out of them. It's almost like the thrill of meat while you're eating vegetables. Twenty feet away, she decides to purchase the other romaine - the shorter ones. Unable to contain my wonder, I ask if the shorter ones taste better than the longer ones. She says they're different. Of course they're different - one is longer.
At this point, she starts to get edgy. Oddly enough, it's not because of me... it's because she can't find the Coke. The store has a little game they play call Hide the Soda, where they like to move it so you can't find it the next time you come back. They had done a magnificent job - I have to hand it to them. All other sodas appeared here and there on endcaps but nowhere else. I suggested we look near the bicycles and cell phones, with no success. She mentioned that it was a holiday weekend, so they really should have lots of Coke about. Of course it was a holiday weekend: that explains why there was no Coke to be found.
Then my wife did something I never see... she picked up a package of pulled pork. What a cruel thing to do to someone who just got deprived of two BBQ restaurants in a row. Pulled pork from a frozen container. She might as well pull out a Chinese-made copy of my favorite guitar and ask if this is the one I want. Or worse, Pepsi.
None of this is doing my temper a bit of good.
I explained to a number of her that I did NOT want to be there, so they promised to make it as quick and painless as possible. In order to make it go faster, they stopped at the book table, that stretched most of an aisle and looked at every book, talking out loud about it. All I can say is that it was a good thing they were making it quick and painless for me - otherwise I would have gotten really upset.
Off to checkout, which usually goes well. Not this time, of course.
There were about three lanes open, with customers ten deep. I decided that it was my turn to be an asshole in public and told her that if she expected me to wait in this line, I would just leave the cart there and walk out of the store. Before she could hit me with a frozen roast, another lane opened up and beckoned to us. I think they knew.
What a pretty cashier. Approaching model status. Except for the eyebrows. I realize eyebrows are the current thing, but as with all current things, they were comically overdone. Like someone dyed some perfectly-matched caterpillars the darkest black possible and somehow attached them to the same spot over each eye. They were so black that if you looked at them for over two seconds, you would fall into a black hole, where gravity is strongest. What a pretty cashier.
As I'm standing there, praying for the sweet release of death, Wife announces she needs to use the ladies'. Of course she does. Being anywhere with her is like carting around a small yellow bus full of children:
I wanna get ice cream.
I need to go to the bathroom.
I spilled the drink down my shirt.
But you promised we were going to eat.
I don't want to eat - I want you to go back across the city to the zoo.
ZOO ZOO ZOO (chant).
I should be used to this but I'm not smart enough. Unfortunately I'm not tolerant enough either. When she finally returns, I'm grateful. She asks if I paid. No I didn't.. I just put everything in the cart and am now waiting with it on the other side of the register. Of course I'm kidding. You can't enter or exit the store without showing your CostCo card and four forms of ID, including something from the FBI. There's actually some dude by the exit, where you are forced to stop, while he looks over what you just paid for, makes a few notations on the receipt in ancient Sumerian, and tells you to have a nice day. I obviously have no idea what I'm talking about, but the fact that I handed him a receipt seems to indicate I paid for everything. There's an actual line to get out of the store now, as if we were at Burger King.
But I wasn't going to be that lucky, no sir.
I told her I couldn't take this anymore, between the abject disappointments and the alleged people. She said it was the holiday - it was going to be crowded. THEN WHY THE HELL DID YOU DRAG ME IN HERE ON A HOLIDAY? This constitutes spousal abuse, and I was checking through my phone for the number of my favorite celebrity lawyer, Gloria Ironbox. Gloria advised me that this was grounds for divorce, but it would be cheaper to keep her.
Meanwhile back at the store, Wife tells me she needs to stop for a soda. Of course she needs to stop for a soda - it's right before the ZOO in the small yellow bus. I can only imagine the internal consternation on what kind of soda everyone needs. As the line has a lot of people in it, I adopted That Look. That Look can cause concrete buildings to crack down to their foundations. I told her there was NO WAY I was waiting in that line. So she waited in that line.
I want you to stop and appreciate the genius inherent in that move.
I refused to wait in that line. She got in that line. So I had to sit and wait anyway. Other shoppers gave me a wide berth, probably because they thought the constant stream of muttering and cursing and wishing death on all mankind was indicative of somebody who should take a short vacation at the Happy Place<tm>. She returned with a berry icee that she wanted me to try because we've never had it before. And when she says never before, that means we had it last time we were there. This is because the small yellow bus don't remember so good.
She bought a freezer carry bag because we don't have the huge grocery bags we keep in the car for grocery shopping. Where were they? At home. I suggested that perhaps this system wasn't working as intended because we had to buy yet another one. We've spent more on grocery carry bags than medical copays. I asked where they were. She told me they were all over the place. Of course they were - all over the place, except in the car where we needed them.
The parking lot was just renamed The CostCo Speedway, for obvious reasons. I have no idea what happens when people turn into the lot, but they become Indy 500 cars, combined with demolition derby cars. And this is just the old people. Those signs about yielding to pedestrians? They're in place to give the drivers a giggle. We spent a lot of time dodging Dodges. As I'm pulling out, some other idiot does not see my large, invisible car and backs out in front of me. As this point it physically hurt not to give her car the plowing it so richly deserved.
It's not that I don't like CostCo, it's that I hate everyone who shops there.
As my nephew so accurately put it, you go in for some milk and cookies, and leave, $500 later, with a set of tires for your car, having forgotten the milk.
When we get home, half crazed from hunger, she lets loose that the lawn needs mowing.
 |
| I laughed so hard during this scene I couldn't breathe. |
No comments:
Post a Comment