Sometimes, the Supermarket Really is Less Than Super

Bloggers, a word to the wise & otherwise:

If you ever find yourself feverishly and ceaselessly itching the scabby pustule that is writer's block, take my advice: go food shopping.

You will encounter any number of blogworthy topics, whether you feel the need to decry the insidious price-jacking of a small, plastic bottle of Cheerios marketed at the mothers of toddlers that costs $2.99 for one ounce of Cheerios (it was marked down to $1.99, though. Gee, thanks for using lube, pa.) or whether you're particularly grossed out by the vacant, open-mouthed expressions on the deceased rainbow trout beaching themselves on ice-- you'll never leave the supermarket without a tasty idea for your little bloglette.

Trust me.

Today, Mrs. Apron and I went to the supermarket because we needed/wanted produce. We had our hearts set on going to this little Korean produce market, but, alas, it was closed on Sundays. (Weeknights, it's opened until 6:45pm. Seriously, it says that on the sign. Not 6:30, not 7:00-- but six forty-five. Mm-hmm.) So, disappointed but unstoppable in our underpowered PT Cruiser, we putted our way to the local Genaurdi's. I mean, we had even remembered to bring our cloth tote bags and everything.

So, we're at Genaurdi's and we're not even ten minutes into our shopping experience when some woman slams her fat ass into a 6 foot tall cardboard display filled with boxes of specialty "Mighty Leaf" teabags. She stared at the boxes of tea now littering the area and she emitted two small, monosyllabic words, words that you probably would think twice about uttering as loudly and as dramatically as she did in a public place:

"Oohhhhh. Fuuuuck."

Oh fuck. They say that the last words most commonly uttered by pilots at the controls of doomed aircrafts are, "Oh, shit." I guess that's just what you say when you're about to die in a plane crash. I guess "Oh, fuck" is just what you say when you make a complete ass out of yourself in the middle of a supermarket.

Thinking that she was going to in short order pitch in and start apologetically cleaning up her mess as any klutzy, responsible citizen would do, I automatically walked over to the mess and picked up the cardboard display and set it right. Then, I picked up a box of the tea and put it back on the display. There were approximately nineteen boxes left on the floor.

"Oh, man," she said again, aloud, to nobody in particular, "I really just did that, didn't I?"

Um, yeah. You really did. Now can you pull your fingers out of your asshole and help me clean this shit up?

She, of course, did no such thing. She actually bent down to pick up a box, and then she basically just moved it on the floor. She did not put a single box of tea up on the display. I put three boxes back on the display, and then my wife came over and did her share by putting back one box. The fat pig then motioned either to us or to a Genaurdi's employee, I didn't really see, and she said,

"Oh, they'll just clean it up."

Whether she was talking about us or the Genaurdi's employee, it's offensive and cuntytwat. To presume that my wife and I, who, for some reason, had taken the initiative to clean up this hogtit's mess would just continue dutifully putting boxes back until it was all done was outrageous, and my wife and I immediately stopped putting the boxes back and we walked away. To presume that you can make a mess in a supermarket and that "those people who work here" will just clean up after you without even making a goddamn effort to do it yourself is also classist and appalling.

I learned in pre-school, as I'm pretty sure a lot of kids did, that, if you make a mess, you're the one who's supposed to clean it up. Now, obviously that doesn't apply in every situation. It probably wouldn't have been right to take the captain of the Exxon Valdez and throw him in the fucking oil-slicked ocean with a toilet brush and a pair of flippers, but, most of the time, clean up your own mess is pretty much where it's at as far as the social constructs of our society go.

Some people, though, really like to think that they can just float through life, oblivious to all the things that their fat asses knock over because, well, there'll always be somebody to clean it up. Guess what, pigdog, I'm not your maid. I don't even have a maid. I want one, but I don't have one. And, if I did, I'd probably feel so guilty that some poor bitch was coming over to clean up my mess that I'd spend the morning of her visits cleaning.

Sometimes a little good old fashioned guilt is good for people. It keeps them humble. It makes them clean up their own messes.