It’s a Tuesday evening, we have a free day tomorrow. My plan was to get home, slip into pjs and watch the antics of Phil Dunphey and family. However, one of my colleagues mentioned something about a pub (he didn’t suggest a pub, he might have just said the word ‘pub’ and it’s possible it wasn’t even that. He might have said ‘how hard is it to get pub-lished?’ or a more likely ‘say, what are you doing tonight?’
In any event, I ended up at a pub enjoying a beer and the occasional shot that joins it like a sidecar. It is Tuesday, after all, and we have off tomorrow to boot. Beer is allowed. We have many drinks and then it is decided that we move forth to another place. I am eager for the journey as it will A. bring me to another pub, which is B. closer to my house. But alas, there is an issue. Between Pub 1 and Pub the second, there is a place in which one may purchase goods and products for eating and drinking and mish mash in between. We call this place a grocery store.
I have a problem. I admit this. I do not sit at home and order hippo statues I see on late night commercial programming. No. I also don’t have an Amazon problem (like some people who shall remain nameless, but who rented out my mother’s uterus after I had moved out). I also don’t have the many problems associated with drinking too much. I drink once a week as this is all that my almost 50 body and psyche can manage without funding. And on those days, I don’t go pick fights, forget to pay for things, or drive.
My problem is drunken shopping. Or even tipsy shopping. The problem is, we sometimes go to the pub and then I go get food for dinner. Burke waits at the pub for me with the dog just wondering what it is I’m going to come back with that we absolutely do not need. In the past those things have included: a stickless pan, oven mitts, a tool box, a welcome mat (in German. I thought it would be funny.), two lanterns (two different trips), a garlic press that has never and will never work, and the world’s most useless vegetable chopper.
But there I am, standing in front of this beautiful sign: Billa. And I go in. Things are a bit of a blur. I am shopping, chucking things into a basket as if I’ve just won that shopping cart award on an old TV show. I go to the self-checkout and scan things and they beep at me when registered. Beep. Beep. Beep. Very satisfying. The nice man, with whom I have shared linguistically simple japes about whiskey, informs me that Jamesons is on special and shall he grab me a bottle?
“Only one?” I say. “How about dva?”
Beep
Beep
In the morning I am forced to face the consequences of my actions. My backpack is sitting on our armchair. It looks stuffed, things are poking out of the water bottle holders on the side. A tuna can? A packet of pepper? What’s that bright thing?
I pull off the band aid and open it up and spill out the contents onto the coffee table like Dick Dreyfuss and Roy Scheider do in Jaws. Aside from the two bottles of Irish, I bought pepper, two packets of small burrito wraps, two cans of tuna fish, and 8 can sealers for the fridge. I evidently had a hell of a plan for my nighttime. Nevertheless, I make a tuna burrito – heavily peppered – and saved some of the tuna in the can so I could reseal it. The rubber top was too small.
Oh well. Call me when you need a random delivery of unconnected goods brought to your house by a guy who could start the concord with his breath.
