Fear and Loathing in Aisle Eight

Photo by Harrison Keely, CC BY 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

The following is the harrowing true story of a recent trip to the grocery store. It is a cautionary tale and might be too frightening for some audiences. Read at your own risk. You have been warned.

I was three steps into the supermarket when the dread kicked in. My wife had thoughtfully prepared for me a brief shopping list topped with the word pistachios. It was concurrent with that third step that I realized I’d made a terrible, terrible mistake.

Now I know what it’s like to be one of those guys in the shows where they blindfold a dude and leave him in the wilderness with nothing more than a knife and some plastic and metal bits and bobs he might, in theory, be able to fashion into a compass.

I was in the wrong grocery store.

This was now a challenge of survival.

I hadn’t made a small mistake – like taking a list written for a Produce-On-The-Left Market Basket into a Produce-On-The-Right Market Basket – either. In those cases, you can just backwards yourself through it. It’s awkward as all get out, but at least you can maintain some dignity.

No, no; I was holding a Produce-On-The-Left Market Basket shopping list and standing in a Hannaford’s.

There was only one way to go about this: Be methodical.

I started in produce – pistachios grow on trees, right? – and made my way aisle by aisle until I found myself in the cereal aisle, staring at the granola, desperately trying to will pistachios into being just a little farther along the shelf to no avail.

Did I ask for directions? Of course not. I’m not going to let some eighteen year old wearing the uniform of red polo and black leggings shopping for someone who can’t be bothered to do their own damn groceries know that I’m trying to fill a shopping cart from a Produce-On-The-Left Market Basket list in a Hannaford’s like I’m some Morlock stepping out into the glare of the sun for the first time.

What is this bright disc in the ceiling of the world?

Where have the walls gone?

How was I to know that Aisle Eight was labeled, among other things, Nuts?

Never to ask for directions; that is the Law; are we not Men?

I discovered Nut Aisle when I happened upon it, having tried to talk myself into pistachios being appropriate for seven previous aisles.

I crossed pistachios off the list and dropped the bag of them into my basket. Though I’ve lived in New England longer than anywhere else I refuse to adopt certain New Englandisms like “wicked” or the habit of calling a shopping cart a carriage or a buggy, like you go to the grocery store and pick a little something up in the Baby Aisle.

My next challenge: Feta cheese.

Easy, I thought. I’ll just go to the specialty cheeses display. Surely, I’ll find the object of my search there!

My friends, I confess I did not.

No, I had to turn my attention a full 180 degrees to see the section of cold case shelves labeled “Feta and Goat.”

I felt Like Macbeth; having turned the ordered nature of the world on its head it had begun to seem that the very ordered universe itself had identified me as the contagion to be removed.

Two items in, I’d wandered all over the store, some parts more than once.

Next on my list was a packet of yellow rice.

I remembered seeing that one, but where?

I found it in a section labeled Prepared Foods which makes little sense. The rice is raw. You need to cook it in water and butter. But there was some underlying, obscure logic as the macaroni and cheese was there as well, as if anyone other than a psychopath would eat raw macaroni dusted with orange “cheese” powder.

I grabbed three packets, just to be safe.

Given the Odyssean path I’d taken throughout the store I knew for certain that all the other husbands had me picked out for a Wrong Store List Man. They avoided eye contact and shook their heads; there, but for the grace of God, go they.

Last on the list was lettuce. Easy enough to find, but I had to dig through heads of iceberg that looked like they’d been brought in from Farmer Jimmy’s Crumby Lettuce Farm. Found a good one and tossed it into the cart.

I’d completed the list. No longer tethered to the Wrong Store List, the clouds lifted from my eyes. I could orient myself normally. I knew where things were. Just to prove it to myself, I grabbed a four-pack of IPA, some Monterey Jack cheese and a Sprite for the road without any difficulty whatsoever.

The groceries in the back of my car, I knew I’d survived. It was a close-run thing, but I’d survived.

Moral of the story? Ask what store the list is for.