A Few Minutes in Line

I go to the grocery store almost every day. I guess it is a 'lack of confidence in the future' thing. I mean, why buy two days worth of food if something bad may happen? We keep getting all of these warnings from the FBI so why the hell should I buy a gallon of milk when they sell those little cartons? I was just at the store a few minutes ago doing a bit of shopping. The place is fairly busy in the late afternoon with people stopping in after work to get stuff for the evening meal or some beer. I got in line at one of the cash registers.

I should have studied the situation a little more intelligently instead of just blindly picking a line. The guy in front of me had a shopping cart fairly spilling over with stuff with lots of produce that had to be priced by hand. I’m not a line jumper; it is bad luck to move once you are already in a line. You’ll look stupid if the line you move to also grinds to a halt. This is also my philosophy in car traffic.

Why anyone would be in a hurry in a grocery line is a mystery to me. There is plenty of stuff to read in the magazine rack. Sometimes this is my only tie to pop culture. How would I know that Brad and Jen are dating if it weren’t for the grocery line? How would I know that the lobster boy married Siamese twin midgets? Lucky bastard!

Rosie O’Donnell’s corpulent mug graces the cover of one of the scandal sheets next to the headline “Rosie Can’t Stop Drug Habit.” It didn’t say what drug she was abusing. From the looks of her I could make a couple of guesses. Is fried chicken a drug? What about ham?

Lots of magazines--those for men as well as those for women--use the same formula to attract readers although ‘lookers’ is a better term because there isn’t much to read in them. They all have identical covers. Cover up the name and you’d be hard-pressed to tell one magazine from the other.

They all promise to give you the secret to better sex. Are we all doing it wrong or something? I’m pretty much self-taught in that department and I think I manage OK on my own. Every magazine offers up this secret and they all do it every month. I never realized that sex took so much studying. I’m willing to practice on my own but I have enough to read as it is.

These magazines all have the picture of some celebrity on the cover and the promise of an enlightening interview inside. Magazines especially like to tell the story of a celebrity’s struggle to overcome some great obstacle in their life like drug addiction or dyslexia. Why are we so entertained by the hardships of others? That is the subject for another day. Like children, we always insist that these tales have a happy ending.

The third thing that these periodicals all share is the promise of a new diet or ab-flattening/ buns-tightening exercise regimen. I suppose that if you go back over the years there has been a diet of every single possible combination of foods. This means that no matter what you eat you are on some sort of diet. That’s good enough for me.

I try to soak it all in but eventually the cashier has typed in the code for the last bag of chayote squash for the guy in front of me and my reading halts until my next trip to the store. My brush with pop culture is over for the day.