Saturday, April 02, 2011

That's a good price for 12 pounds of nutmeg

Over the 1 1/2 years of marriage, my mature and immature sides have been constantly battling each other. The mature side says: "you're married. You have a kid. Do NOT attempt to sell the kid on eBay." The immature side says: "But this guy in Botswanaland is bidding five goats AND a barrel of goose lard!"

Well, those days are over. My mature side has come up on top at last. What's the proof? I now have a BJ's membership--and we just returned from our maiden trip there. 

Whenever I've entered BJ's or Sam's Club or any of these megastores, my first thought is that this is the place I'm gonna make a beeline for when that nuclear and/or zombie thing finally goes down. You know how in those post-apocalyptic movies there's always some kinda warlord villian with men, booze and saltine crackers? How do you think they got that way? They were the first one to get to BJ's, barricade the doors, and sit inside with a rifle until people started showing up offering sex-for-food deals. The movies are all wrong: The battle in the future won't be for mail or the privilege of not having to drink your own pee or even hanging out on Alcatraz with a bunch of paperbacks...it'll be for tanks of cranberry juice and refridgerator-sized boxes of Slim Jims. 

Anyhoo, we just got back and managed to put everything away. All we needed was a ship's anchor chain to tie the fridge door shut ($12.95, found it in row 7) and to throw away our bed. And now I'm sitting here reflecting on my new mound of supplies: 

  • A bag of Uncle Ben's rice roughly the same size (and weight) as a bag of cement. Won't need to buy rice again for the next two presidential terms. 
  • Two Wilbur's and one Babe's worth of Honey-smoked ham
  • Enough diapers to attend to the needs of the entire county's 1-3 year-old and 80-120-year-old population. 
  • A block of cheese so large that I'm tempted to eat my way into it and make a little cheese cave (a childhood dream) 
  • Enough spaghetti to feed a busload full of ravenous Genoese
  • And enough Genoese salami to...well, let's say that I appreciate salami. 
But what now? What do I do with my life now that I got more crackers than Alabama and more nuts than a Wisconsin teacher's union? Is this all there is to life? 
Of course not. But it is nice to have all the simple needs of me and my family satisfied for the next couple months. Now I can worry about more important things, like finding out where we're going to sleep. Wait..the toilet paper. We got four rafts worth. Problem solved...unless we gotta go to the bathroom. At least we won't have to drink our own pee. Plus I finally got my cheese cave.