You know what’s crazy? I”ll tell you what’s crazy™
The Supermarket Superbowl.
Bigger than the 4th of July?
Bigger than Thanksgiving?
When it comes to shopping, it’s these two holidays combined.
It’s Christmas Eve Day.
Why?
Because the store is closed on Christmas day.
Everything is closed on Christmas day.
Trust me, I checked.
I called every restaurant in a 2 mile radius.
“It’s Christmas sir. Of course we’re close. Everyone is closed. What are you homeless?”
“Huh? uh, Yeah. That’s what I hear. Thanks.”
December 24th.
It’s the New Millennium battlefield of food.
I walk into the Publix Supermarket.
Initially I’m hopeful. Maybe I beat the crowds.
It’s 8:30 am. I hope my shopping experience will be a barren tundra of calm.
Instead I walk into percolating panic.
I would rather dine out.
But that is impossible like getting Rosie O’Donnell to stop singing show tunes.
So I must cook. But if I have to cook, I’m better if I just warm it up.
I can set an oven to 425 degrees as well as the next guy.
So I go to the Deli.
The aroma of Roasted chicken is ferocious.
The smell is aggressive like a lion hiding in the tall grass ready to jump into my nostrils.
“You guys open?” I ask the woman behind the glass.
“People don’t like to cook on Christmas Eve,” The deli manager says.
“Better get your chicken now, they’re going to go fast.”
I look at the succulent birds spinning in the bright box with the heat lamp.
Juices are flowing and the skin turning brown.
The smell is magnificent. It is like a feather tickling the olfactory center of my brain.
It’s only 8:30 am and I want to eat a chicken.
I am a coyote outside the chicken coop.
I am inhaling the primordial delicacy of life and my salivary glands are enlarged and moist and I must consume.
“OK,” give me one.
“Oh sorry. 30 more minutes,” she says.
Prick Tease is what I think
“OK, I’ll be back,” is what I say.
I walk into the store.
There’s a buzz at this early hour.
It’s a cross between hung over and nervous.
The store needs an Excedrin because I can see it has a headache and a bad back.
People look haggard, like they just rolled out of bed.
They are sweat-pants wearing zombies with stinky breath and glazed teeth.
Some people are holding lists and some just walking through aisles staring at millions of jars of who knows what.
It looks like a DUI checkpoint on New Year’s Eve.
Shoppers are stumbling and slurring. These lost souls need to be incarcerated or sent back home to get some more sleep.
I’m in aisle 13. A man is standing there with an ugly Christmas sweater. He is quiet, pensive, wondering why he’s holding a spatula and a melting tub of margarine.
The holiday season is upon us and so is the race to finish.
There’s an innate need to cook, to eat to entertain.
It’s primal, like an aquifer that flows underground.
I see a man with 2 days of stubble. The hair on his head is sticking up like it’s magnetized by the incandescent lights over head.
He pushes a cart through the tomato paste aisle. He looks angry. He looks lost. Was he sent here by his wife? Did he come here on his own?
Maybe he is a bad man and this is his personal tomato sauce purgatory.
I stare at the man and wonder if I have seen him before.
He looks like an ad for witness protection.
He is an aisle zombie on the penultimate day before Christmas.
He is under pressure to get something in a store that is all ready a pressure cooker.
I shake my head and keep moving. Always move, like the shark.
I feel it. People are short-tempered.
As I silently trudge forward angry thoughts fill my thoughts.
Get that cart out of my way you old hag.
Keep your kid on a leash ok?
You really eat that brand of sausage? That’s Salvation Army lady.
My cart is 3 wobbly wheels and a stuck tire that is leaving skid marks on the formica floor.
I would get a new cart, but they are outside.
Going outside requires a gear I don’t have.
Might as well give me a passport and send me to the dark side of the moon.
Push forward, I think. Even if that means I’m leaving a skid mark through the entire store.
I look at the cashiers.
They are ringing up orders with the alacrity of sludge.
A woman sees me and waves.
I wave back.
She is smiling, but she seems nervous, frazzled, like a Christmas bow that has been untied by a possum.
The stress in the check out lane is palpable. It’s a tea-pot, water boiling, whistle starting to churn.
I can see the bag boys making mistakes. I see butter go into a sack with shoe polish.
Butter and Shoe Polish?
How do you make that mistake Jr?
That’s bag boy 101.
There’s no reason for it, but there it is.
A glaring bag boy mistake, all produced by stress and people cramming two shopping days into one shopping day.
Today is the Superbowl of shopping, and you can feel the pressure, you can see the mistakes.
“You guys open Christmas day,” I ask a clerk for fun.
He laughs. “You kidding. That’s why it’s so crazy in here. People getting their shop on.”
He wipes a bead of sweat from his brow.
Getting their shop on. Hilarious. Scary.
I look in my own cart.
What the hell am I doing?
Milk. Eggs. Dr. Pepper. A whisk.
A whisk? How the hell did that get in here?
How random. Like a swap meet in South Central L.A.
I plan to cook Christmas day. It’s the reason I’m here.
The problem is, I can’t cook.
I have as much culinary talent as a cock roach in a beauty pageant.
Christmas screams turkey and gravy and all the fixins.
Not for me.
Where my neighbor will be cooking a turkey, I’ll be grilling a burger.
Where friends are cooking ham, I will warm up store-bought mashed potatoes and mac and cheese.
How silly has this become?
I bought Coca Puffs for God’s Sakes.
I pay for the assortment of lunacy in my cart.
$108.00
For what I say looking at the three plastic bags.
“Can I help you out with that sir?”
I look at the bagging savant who mixed shoe polish and butter.
“That’s ok young man. There’s a lot of other Haitian Boat Refugees coming through here. They’re going to need your bagging expertise.”
He smiles. “yes sir.”
And with that, I push my 3 wobbly, 1 dead ass wheeled cart out of the store.
I am a rolling crime scene leaving a tuberculosis ward.
I exit the store and inhale the December 24th air.
I see more blank face miscreants wobbling through the parking lot.
Merry Christmas y’all.
Life’s Crazy™