Grocery Store Mirages

Having a small child exponentially increases the amount of time you spend at the grocery store.
Not just because they consume and/or destroy nearly everything within their reach, but because having a child means to be forever in want of places to take them. During daylight hours you have options- parks, beaches, the front yard, etc etc.
Nightfall truncates those options with morbid certainty.

There's never enough for Fuss to do.
A day when sunrise triggered a Mardi Gras parade, sunset celbrated with it a combination air show/fireworks display and which stuffed the hours between with a stream of protean marvels and astonishment like a Foi Gras goose fed on miracles would leave him tugging at my elbow, asking "Dada? You CHASE me now? Dada, wanna play MOUSIE GAME MOUSETRAP! Dada? Dada? Dada? Dada?"

So, we spend more time at the store than would be suggested by our per capita household consumption of good.


We're at the store late-ish the other night for no particular reason other than the sun was down and Fuss was antsy. At peak hours the asiles present a representative cross-section of humanity. The later the hour, the thinner and stranger the population gets.

Our first oddity was a woman of late middle age, not obviously deranged, pushing around a tiny kid's shopping carts with a plastic flag on a pole at adult eye level declaring the bearer a Future Ralphs Shopper!

I initially thought she'd just been temporarily abandoned by her own Future Ralph's Shopper, but we kept running into her, the cart kept filling up as as far as I could tell Fuss was the only child in the store.

The second was a Suicide Girls logo tramp stamp tattoo.

Which, you know, whatever. Better than a huge Anheiser Busch logo neck tat.

But as we draw nearer and the lucky tattoo recipient rises to vertical, I see it's a guy.

And that's plain weird.