Grocery Shopping

Well finally have a fridge and sometime to hit up the grocery store, after the past few months of hanging out at the local haunts for my daily dose of meals, it is back to the somewhat weekly ritual of grabbing a shopping cart with busted up wheels and heading back over to the once habitually visited Vons, known as the new Ghetto Vons, not to be mixed up with the Old Ghetto Vons with such diverse characters of homeless, panhandlers, drug addicts, boozers, and insane with generally nothing else to do except everything from accost to entertain the passing customers as they made their way into or out of the grocery store, while ocassionally mustering up enough courage to make a liquor hijacking just before they closed down one side of the store's entrance, in fact due such dilgence and persistance of would be theives, the old ghetto Vons had to permanately shutdown the liquor store side entrance permanently to cut down on the amount of looting from everyone from frat pledges to derrange sociopathic binge drinkers.

The new ghetto Vons is conveniently located near a brand new park in a section of central Las Vegas that is known more for its high level of crime than its proximity to the strip itself. On this block you can find anything from low end narcotics to mindless meth addicted prositutes wandering about in search of some easy money whether from the nearby conventioners of the Las Vegas Convention Center or from the random local on their way home from a long evening cleaning out slot machines at one of the many strip hotels. So there tends to be a lot of action in front of the new Ghetto Vons tonight, your usual assortment of people with little to do, a few guys hanging out with the local rent a cop, whether life long friend or sort of new hanger on who takes up most his time with attempts of talking to marginally and down right nasty looking women who are either bent on gorging down on food or lost in the Las Vegas fantasy of what can you do for me, well checking in at 185 plus with marginal looks still seems to have a way of effecting even the most selective man, just the nature of the male in general, get it in if you can, then deal with the emotions, the attachment, and eventual misunderstandings that will follow.

Of course, someone is going to hit me up for money on the way in, just a classic part of the grocery shopping experience, not much to get around it, the rent a cop don't care, he's from a poor background, so it has been part of his culture from the get go, every since the rent a cop was old enough to sneak into a 7-11 and fill his pockets full of candy then run out before the cashier could stop him, now look at his lot in life, passing time, waiting to be discovered as the next rap star or merely holding down some sort of position, allowing him to pay for the weed, the booze, and maybe a hooker off of Craigslist. I pass the gauntlet of characters on my way in while nearly taking out the sliding door entrance to the place, had a few on the way in, weather too nice now, to consider full time sobriety, have really been putting in the effort to kick all the drugs and for the most part have been successful, no hard stuff or late nights that did not involve something work related to keep me up past 12a, sort of weird getting 8 or 9 hours of sleep then falling into a schedule to maintain the motivation the push further away from my addictive binging tendencies, not really summer party weather yet anyway, even as the Winter Music Conference in Miami ramps up this week, a mecca for decadent behavior where staying for four days straights is fairly ordinary, while turning the mind into the vehicle for hallucingenic behavior, maybe next year.

Inside Vons, have to go through the memory to remember exactly what I usually buy inside the grocery store, not too many things, if only for the fact that cooking takes so much time and after working 12 to 20 hours in a day with the idea of having to do it again the next morning usually puts me in the realm of food that is either pre-prapared or more along the sandwhich level, not much activity, only the process of mashing a couple of things together then getting on with the rest of my evening, involving writing or business stuff, topped off with a solid helping of Facebook or some other means of distraction to further distance myself from dealing with all the real thoughts and tangents floating through my mind at the time. Secondly, I live upstairs now in a condo, so the though of making three trips to the car for groceries has seriously put a limit on exactly what I am willing to carry in one move back to the condo, real singles lifestyle, well if that was the case, eating out every night or not eating all would suffice, make washing dishes, taking out the trash, and establishing a nest of plastic bags all the more irrelavent.

Of course, there are plenty of strange folk in the grocery store tonight, some kid with a blonde mohawk, beat up black cut off jeans, with metal chains, and that Hells Angel's like cutoff sleeves jacket with some old school band banner on the back, like the Addicts, GBH, or the Crass a real throw back to the early 80's which seems to be all the rage lately, another blog for another time, plus all the regualar assortment of folks who are heading home or looking to finish off the rest of the balance of their WIC cards by purchasing goods for other people then trading them in for cigarette, alcohol, meth, or crack money, why just sell the card up front, some people do, given the opportunity, jeez when I was back on that shit, they just had the coupons that looked like money sort of, my mom would drive us clear across the city to an even crappier part of town than we were living in at the time, in order to avoid detection from anyone we might have known, what can you do when you have no family support and the world has turn their back on you, move forward and never forget, let it burn forever, making success all that more sweet, but humble at the same time, while dodging the sell out, the ever prevalent sell out which has accomplished task of melting down more brains in this world than all the most powerful drugs combined, but every economy needs its consumers so fall in line.

Get hit on by some crackwhore with a shovel butt, checking me out as if I might hit her up with some money or something she can pawn to score a twenty rock which might only end up being a ten, yet as long she gets that taste, that smell, and crackling sensation of a hit, everything will workout in the end, cuts down on the food bill as well. Otherwise, pretty slow night in the store and I am out of there in ten minutes, pushing my cart pass the assortment of magazines ranging from Men's Fitness to WWE magazine, there is a subculture for everything but the fact publishers still put out real hard copy paper based material in the 21st century seems to me nothing but a losing proposition, the internet has taken the lead in the information age and will not relinquish the title no matter how many steriod filled actors you put on the cover of a magazine. Aisle after aisle there is an over abundance of processed food to induce the most highly dose of dopamine from the indulgence of carb based foods, it reminds me of the scene in The Hurt Locker where the main character comes back to the US after his tour in Iraq to go grocery shopping, he is in the cereal section surrounded by two lanes eight feet high full of cereal, this is what freedom has been fought for, the priviledge to walk down a shopping lane with one hundred different choice of what to eat for breakfast, feels overwhelming, Trix, Coco Pebbles, or Lucky Charms, not too much in the health department and for what that stuff costs nowadays, I have the feeling there may be something more in those cereals than merely sugar that keeps parents bending their will when the kids start screaming about having to get the generic cereal knockoff of all the greatest and hip cereals of the moment. It is fairly late in the evening, stockers are doing a bit of maintence on the products, bringing the backstock to the front in order to give a more picturesque look as if preparing the location for a scene in a movie or some other sort of advertising vehicle, but not tonight, time to move past all the people over at the dollar DVD rack and various others arguing over the merits of 22 ounce malt liqour beer versus the typical white trash 12 pack. Once in line, a cashier is posted at the register sitting down on a stool, spreadout sort of like Jabba the Hut and here I see where our collective decadent ways have taken this country to a place of overweight, unconscious, and unconcerned lifestyles, craving consumption in any format, for no reason, programmed to continue purchasing, eating, and driving waste out into the oceans of the world. This cashier is a prime example, could be considered a victim or nothing more than a willing participant as her girth lays out upon her hips like a laid in bean bag, at least she can reach over and bag the groceries, do not expect her to get up to put them in the cart, so I oblige, while still wondering how we have let people, ourselves, and society come to this point, where everyone is afraid to say, enough, do we have to be slaves to this system of having three beers everyday, honking down all the drugs people can get their hands on, or simply smoking themselves into a safe shelter far from the legions of other people who have locked themselves into the cubicle culture of America, unwilling to participate in the change that is taking place in the world without them, the future is passing this country by, no one really cares, the curtain is closing, will there be an Act Two for America or will this soverign nation get globbled up into the Web 2.0 that is here now. As I grab my groceries to leave I look over my back at the local cretins sizing up my wallet and my attitude, automatically, hostility masks my face, signalling to any would be predator that I am not worth the time, effort, and injury getting with me shall involved, back to the safe confines of my gated community, later.