Where Is Jeremy?

I’m enslaved, by a habit that’s not just part of my daily shopping routine, but the best part. You'll know it when you read it. On my way home every afternoon, I swing by my local grocery and avail myself of their make-your-own-damn-salad bar as I prepare my healthy lunch for the following day. 

At the rate at which I make and eat salads, I should be so healthy I glow in the dark. I eat salad because I’m told it’s good for me; I have no idea or proof of truth and have even less interest in finding out. I do believe if there is a just and merciful God S/He could have had broccoli taste like chocolate, thus making those created in Her/His image very happy. And healthy.

There’s not a lot of variation in how I assemble the salad-lettuce, peppers, those goofy small tomatoes that explode everywhere when you cut them into smaller pieces (but they’re too large to not cut), some spinach, pieces of pineapple, a few sliced strawberries, cranberries and some pieces of white meat chicken all go in the aluminum foil and I pop a plastic lid on top (so the salad can see where we’re going?).

I use the self-checkout register because it’s almost always open and there’s no line, especially after I not too softly whisper “I own you now” after every purchase crosses the scanner. You'd be surprised how quickly people find other lines. The self-checkout has The Voice encouraging me to use my market’s preferred shopper card and then thanking me for so doing. If I have bar-coded items, all of that merchandise goes first. I put the things in those terribly thin plastic bags which are impossible to separate so you end up with hundreds of landfill-choking plastic bags you can never use for anything else and you dare not throw away.

Yesterday I also bought eggs as we had none at home. Every home should have an eggscess of eggs. I can't understand why that slogan still hasn't caught on. Your loss. I buy HUGE eggs but there’s always one I forget to check that’s welded to the bottom of the cardboard container by escaped egg insides which have now hardened. This means for the price of twelve eggs I purchase eleven. I do this with a consistency I no longer find funny. I blame the chickens for the broken eggs; perhaps that why I eat my salad with chicken pieces, but never chicken salad. Perhaps not.

Anyway. The salad doesn’t have a bar code (yet), so when I place it on the scanner/scale, I have to touch the screen display for produce and The Voice explains “touch the item to purchase.” That, of course, is crap. What I have to do is touch the image on the touch screen showing a salad (not unlike the one I made). Touching the salad itself accomplishes nothing. I know this because I do it at least once every day, more often if there’s no one behind me. Every time I do as The Voice directs, and nothing happens, I go “no?” in a tone of wounded surprise that sounds genuine even though I know it’s not. And I smile because I just crack myself up with this routine every single day.   

Why am I telling you this? Because if you’re a resident of Florida and are voting today in your state’s Republican presidential primary, I was hoping to distract you from so doing since I’m pretty well convinced, despite history to the contrary, there are worse things that can happen to us than a hanging chad. And three of your choices have the same number of letters in their first name.  May I offer you a lightly used egg?  

-bill kenny