2004-01-09

From my friend Igg: Argh, my skin! Apart from being deeply and profoundly horrifying on a visceral level, this is kind of cool, in a Hellraiser sort of way. I hope she said �Jesus wept!� at least once. If she didn�t, it was a total waste of whole-body skin loss. If my skin fell off, I can tell you I�d be saying �Jesus wept� all the damn time and laughing my ass off (literally!). Well, between the bouts of uncontrollable, hysterical shrieking, that is.

Further news of my adventures in consumerism: I�ve started going to a new grocery store. This is Big Fun in Robin-land, because I do most of my own cooking, and go through great heaping ass-loads of produce. And this grocery store is enormous. It is huge to the point of hyperbole. It takes up an entire block. It took legions of slaves ten years to build, toiling in loincloths in the hot sun, bent under the Mighty Grocer�s lash. It is a temple, a looming juggernaut of orgiastic consumption.

I made my first pilgrimage to this cathedral of carnality on New Year�s Eve, which was pretty stupid of me; but New Year�s Eve didn�t immediately strike me as a bumper grocery-buying day � I didn�t expect trampling herds of desperate, last-minute Nog shoppers, obviously because I am stupid and tend to forget that people sometimes, on festive occasions, do wacky things like �entertain.� The place was bedlam. This was a bad scene right off the bat, because I was in an unfamiliar grocery store and therefore already disoriented and prone to fits of stomping about irritably, muttering �If I were cumin, where would I be?� To make matters worse, the store anticipates that people will be making off with an absolute embarrassment of food, and thus provides carts that should really come with a yoked pair of oxen to haul them around. The aisles were clogged with people playing a survival-of-the-fittest game of Bumper Carts.

And, of course, the maddened scramble to snatch the ripest cantaloupe brought out the retard in everyone. I got stuck behind one woman as she ordered an employee to hand her a bag of carrots: �The one just to the left of your hand. No, down a bit � the one right next to that one,� like she was buying a lottery ticket or something. While she was still within earshot, I loudly asked the clerk to hand me ��just ANY bag of carrots, if you wouldn�t mind.�

Anyway, I don�t really have a point here, other than to make yet another rambling narrative detour on the road to People Suck. Really I just needed a lead-in to talk about the bus ride to and from the grocery store, which takes me through a neighborhood adjacent to mine that I have never hitherto spent much time in. Riding the bus through it made me realize that it is the coolest neighborhood in Ottawa: everything I need is located right along the bus route! Bars? Check. Grocery store? And how! Bookstores? Yup. Caf�s? Got �em. �Cake Decorator�s World�? Yes sir!

Cake Decorator�s World! �Tis a joyful place, peopled with twee Marzipan folk who tend pastel-hued gardens of sugar flowers until the first frosting of winter spreads twinkling sweetness across the land. Is it wrong that I entertain hallucinogenically elaborate fantasies about baked goods? Because if it is, I don�t wanna be right.