Carrots are so fine, you get a dozen for a dime...

It's shopping night.

Groceries. Victuals. Staples. A nightly hike up the food pyramid which somehow is capped with blue cheese stuffed olives. Tasty? Who knows. I may just wrap a martini around a few one of these weekends and see. I figure any food that has my friend Jim rolling his eyes into the back of his head has to be on my shopping list at least once.

Besides, I re-opened a jar of olives this weekend passed only to find what was left of them floating around in a moldy brine. Ok, so, can someone explain to me how something that is pickled can go bad? Isn't that the point? Isn't that why most sixteenth century sea captains who read the wind badly and wound up spending too much time on open water because they could fart harder than the wind was blowing, got tossed overboard eventually? The men wanted to land. The food sucked out here. It was pickled, salted and preserved. So now at the start of the twenty first century not only does a car trip up interstate 95 to New England take as long as a sail to Holland, the pickled and brined food goes bad!

What gives? I once kept ketchup for five years. Now I have to read the "best before" labels on olives? Niblets in a can gonna come with an expiration date? "Hey, hurry that Armageddon thing up will you, my bomb shelter food is spoiling."

I'm sure there's a chemical reason for olives going bad. I just don't want to know it.

Anyway, I have cheese stuffed olives that I picked up tonight from the upscale food place across town. I shop there. Pretty much exclusively. Couple of reasons: One, you can get cheese stuffed olives. The more pedestrian place near my place really only has cheese stuffed children filling up the aisles grabbing whatever Twinkie like concoction comes just a little too close. Two, I'm a food snob and snobby food lives there where as the other place carries brands along the lines of "Cholesterol Maid" and "NASCAReios." Finally, and here's the real nitty gritty: The women are better looking. Not that I'm trolling although I really am in a nice, standoffish sort of way. But frankly, I'm also tired of being harried by some octogenarian with a can of Purina Tuna and Cheese bits pressing me for my take on it's digestibility.

"I'm sure the cat will love it. Oh, it's not for the cat?"

Nothing to really comment on at the store tonight. I resisted buying chicken because I already have a freezer full of chicken. To the point of give me a suture needle, an elevating slab and a stormy night and I'll give you Frankenpullet.

Couple of kids running around the parking lot in a Mercedes Benz. Ok folks, all I can think of right now is some endocrinologist in White Plains muttering to himself "I know I parked the fucking thing around here somewhere..."

There were six of them in the Merc. Together, I think their ages approached thirty. They were parking as I walked in and as I was done and loading groceries into the trunk so that they could go skittering out of their bags and into the farthest reaches of the car once I turned the first corner out of the parking lot, the Mercedes orphans returned.

I was afraid I was going to be assaulted by them.

"Like, give me, like, your money."

"Don't want my credit cards too?"

"WHAT-ever!"

"Hey, is that a scratch on the car's bumper?"

"Ohmygodomygodohmygodohmygod!!!"

Good thing I've mastered the martial art of Tae Bo Guilt. My accusatory inflections are registered lethal weapons.

"It's maaagic!"

Bunny on.