My Heart of Darkness Is Surprisingly Well-Lit

JR and I are going to be broke soon largely because I'm too awesome at a certain game. That game is called "Grocery Shopping: The Game of Sustenance," and on Saturday, I beat my high score. Even I, a seasoned player in the game of Grocery Shopping, found myself audibly whispering "Oh, holy fuck" when my sworn opponent, Surly Teenage Cash-Register Chick at Copps, tallied up my final score. Granted, it was pre-card-swipe, but it still was so high that another opponent, Grouchy Old Gnome-Lady Only Buying 18 Cans of Catfood, bestowed upon me a look of absolute shock.

I can attribute this most recent food-victory to several mitigating factors. One was that, instead of going with AK or BT or even the elusive EV, I borrowed BT's car and went on a solo mission. On solo missions, there are no teammates to give me looks of quiet judgment when I put the $8 block of aged gouda into my cart or pick up the third package of Thick-Cut Double-Smoked Bacon. So, without those stern and disapproving stares (or, in the least, what I project onto them as being stern and disapproving stares), I turn into a creature of pure, food-directed id. Reality falls away behind me as I gaze longingly upon the perfectly-arrayed cuts of $12 a pound fresh-caught Atlantic halibut; my consciousness is overwhelmed before the prospect of sale-priced bricks of mediocre cheddar; my normally ethereal yearning for Little Debbie Swiss Rolls is consummated in a salivating, guilt-ridden trip down the bread aisle. People: it's all hindbrain once my feet hit those dirty linoleum tiles.

Another major contributor was the shopping list JR wrote, which only included four things: "aluminum foil, sage, ricotta, everything." Granted, our cupboards were (relatively) bare, but that kind of free reign should not be given to me. As most people who know me will attest, I have nothing even resembling self-denial. In my book, "everything" is shorthand for "everything you could possibly justify to yourself as conceivably wanting and/or needing, ever, so just fucking go for it dude because you know you want to and JR won't get this for you when she goes shopping so you may as well just get it now and not think about the consequences of buying so much shit."

I also managed to hit the special Bonus Round, the equally ill-advised "Copps Liquor Store That Is Part of the Regular Grocery Store." Even though I managed to keep it at just two bottles of wine (one for us, one for BT), it was more or less what pushed me over the top of my old high score. Luckily, there was literally no space left in the cart for me to put those cases of beer I needed.

Lastly, and I should know better by now, I went after procrastinating so much (thank you, "Enemy of the State" on the CW) that I became hungry. And shopping while hungry is never a great idea, mostly because A) it makes me shop with my stomach, and B) I make faster (and more ill-advised) decisions so that I can get home sooner to eat all of those ill-advised decisions.

There are probably other significant factors as well, most notably the fact that I went right before we were supposed to get a blizzard that never fully panned out and that, as a result, the place was mobbed. In those situations, my Apocalypse survival mode switch gets flipped and I begin picturing JR and myself holed up in our kitchen, shotgun in hand, waiting for the carnivorous zombies to die off from starvation. And I think to myself, "Shit, well that will probably take a while, so I better buy all these cans of chicken broth that everybody else is buying. I don't want to be stuck in my apartment with no chicken broth." So, like the other pre-storm hoarders around me, my ability to think clearly completely dissipates and I buy about forty cans of chicken broth that will expire in a month anyways.

That's the story of my high score. But now that I've set the bar that high for myself, I'll just have to work harder. With Easter coming up, I'm sure that I can fit at least $400 worth of ham alone into a shopping cart. And there's always the Scotch Section of the Liquor Store Bonus Round. Hooray.