Typically when I make a trip to the store I am listless, I have a general idea of what I am planning on purchasing, but rarely does it end up being strictly what I had charted out in my head to purchase.  Meijers, D&W, and Target are all stores that I fall into such a trap and frequently I will go in to such stores thinking I don’t need a cart only to end up trying to carry twelve items through the store in my arms.  While grocery stores are always a bit problematic when it comes to my tendency to over purchase, a store where you can buy a kayak, set of teflon pans, and crab legs all under the same roof has a tendency to exacerbate my enthusiasm for consumerism.   While Costco is truly amazing, as I have stated in prior blogs, the one issue I have with the superstore is that you never know if the item they are selling is going to be there the next time you show up to shop.  That’s why the last trip I took there I didn’t even hesitate as I walked through the entrance and saw a key chain alcohol detector for sale.  The official name of the product is the BACtrack and it says on the packaging that it is Perfect For:

• Easily Estimating Your Alcohol Level
• Staying Safe While Consuming Alcohol

I’ll get into wether the packaging is truthful in a moment, but I immediately threw the BAC device in my cart, yes I was smart enough to get a cart even though I was only planning on purchasing a couple boxes of turkey sausage breakfast burritos.  As I took the round about way to the freezer section I went past the liquor aisle, hmmm, I probably should pick up some liquor so I can test out my key chain alcohol detector, I have plenty at home, but just in case I may as well grab a 1.75 liter of Kirkland Canadian Whiskey (The good stuff) and a 1.75 liter of Kirkland Spiced Rum (also the good stuff), it’s not good because it necessarily tastes good, it’s good because it is quite inexpensive and still gets the job done as effectively as some of the more pricey brands.  Also, for those of you who aren’t familiar with the world of alcohol, those are the big bottles.  I also picked up a pair of USDA prime Ribeye steaks as I made my way over to the burritos.  Once I made my way over to the frozen breakfast foods I was enveloped in panic, I couldn’t find my breakfast burritos, I knew I should have purchase 18 boxes instead of 10 the last time I was at Costco!  Ultimately they were no where to be found and I had to settle for Jimmy Dean turkey sausage sandwiches.  Good thing I had 3.5 liters of hard alcohol to make me feel better when I got home.  Ultimately after checking out I discovered my bill to be about 8 times more than I was initially planning on spending.  Honestly, I don’t think I have ever gone to Costco and come out on the low end of things from a financial standpoint.  (Besides spending an astronomical amount of money for 6 things, I also got a nice laugh out of the check out guy when I put my two bottles of booze and BACtrack on the conveyer belt)

Was the BACtrack truthful? Sort of, but I would think that they would know most of the people purchasing these things are grossly out of shape, including my golf partner who had the privilege of trying it out the next day.  He had to blow for at least twelve seconds straight to get a reading and appeared to have a miniature stroke the third time he attempted to gauge his BAC.  It was somewhat discouraging that I was chastised for only registering a .06 on my first go at it but widely cheered once I hit the .10 mark.  As far as the staying safe thing, the level of wind required to get a “valid” reading makes me think driving home impaired may be the safer option.

As indicated earlier, Target is another store that always catches me off guard.  Just yesterday I went in there to replace my water bottle only to come out with three packages of gluten free pumpkin spice organic waffles as well as two large containers of Yogurt, bread, russet potatoes (I kind of planned on getting those), and granola.  I also bought some individually wrapped turkey bacon burritos, but they were not nearly as economical as Costoco’s version.  The waffles seemed like a good idea for Tod and Ted since they are still consuming breakfast cereal every morning despite Shirley sending me an article basically outlining why breakfast cereal is more unhealthy than drinking a raw sewage smoothy, and after sending the article claiming our kids are never eating it again.  What’s the alternative?  Oh something that takes time and preparation?  I guess we will stick with cereal.

Well this morning Tod and Ted each had a waffle, they didn’t complain about how shitty they were because they were watching something on Shirley’s phone and would have eaten a turd sandwich without a peep due to their level of engrossment in Wildcrats.  However, Ted had left a couple bites on his plate and the waffle was disgusting.  Guess what you need to make something taste good? Gluten and preservatives.  Honestly, I have never really gotten on the eat incredibly healthy band wagon because it sucks.  You need all the stuff that is bad for you so your food will taste good and that’s a trade off I am willing to take.  I love meat, you could show me every single piece of propaganda about how bad meat animals are treated before they become meat and I would say “give me seconds of that meat!”  I have a smoker, you know what tastes better than meat?   Smoked meat.

The people that give up gluten, stick to organic entirely, and don’t eat meat are pussies and to make it worse they are the type of people who think they are better than you because they are making the right choices, aren’t they?  Sorry, your making terrible choices, you are taking a big part of the joy out of life, eating delicious food, so that you can live a few years longer.  Guess what?  Those are the shitty years, where you have to get up eight times a night to pee, your testicles grow but your penis shrinks (not sure what happens to vaginas as they age but it can’t be pretty since they aren’t all that pretty to begin with), ear and nose hair become unmanageable and even the site of yourself naked startles you.  On top of that, you begin to talk about shit no one cares about and most people can’t stand to be around you.  In all honesty, you would have been better off dying years ago, but you didn’t eat meat and gluten, eating that was almost as unthinkable as bringing something with peanuts in it to an elementary school.  Now all you have to do to pass the time is chart how much your nose, earlobes, and testicles have grown since last week.   (it’s a fact old people are the worst, millennials are creeping up on them, but they are still the worst)

There are a few more things that need to be addressed before I go pick up Tod and Ted from school, and yes they will expect that I have at least two snacks for them and the first thing they say to me won’t be “how was your day dad?”  it will be “what snacks do you have for us?”  I use to joke around and say broccoli, but that isn’t even funny anymore, it’s typically two of these items: Cheetos, chocolate covered pretzels, muddy buddies, and gummy worms.  I typically make them eat a banana or an apple before they get their two good snacks.  So, am I a bad parent for this dietary indiscretion? Nope, I am a bad parent for a lot of other reasons but not because I cave in to their snacking desires.  When I was growing up my mom fed us sugar and when we ate all of that she fed us more sugar and then after that we ate something else that had sugar as one of its primary ingredients.  Unfortunately it wasn’t typically good sugar, it usually was something out of the little Debbie snack line, I was always amazed at how Little Debbie could screw up sugar.  My siblings and I ended up turning out fine, at least from a physical standpoint, from a mental standpoint we are still touch and go, but our childhood diet has had few repercussions on our adult life.

To even further cement my point is the fact that most professional athletes grow up in poverty and are likely consuming government cheese as their primary food group as they grow up.  They are all doing fine now aren’t they?  Guess what else those athletes and me and my siblings had in common growing up?  We ate peanuts.  We weren’t afraid of peanuts, in fact we ate peanuts like they were candy, and that’s saying something because I ate a shit ton of candy growing up.  I’d really like to know who it was that ruined peanuts for everyone, that person is almost as despicable as the guy who had sex with a monkey in Africa and started AIDS.  Regardless, we will probably never know who created the pandemonium over peanuts, but it has gotten to the point that you can’t even unknowingly pack peanut laced granola bars for your kids without feeling like a criminal.  Two weeks ago I sent chocolate chip granola bars, yes that is how they were labeled, with my kids to school.  When I picked them up from school said granola bars were in a zip locked bag with a note alerting me to the fact that the granola bars contained peanut bi-products.  WTF?  Do they have a peanut detector at their school?  Even if my kids had eaten them what would have been the catastrophic result?  Would them breathing on an allergenic (pussy) kid with peanut residue in their mouth result in the allergenic (pussy) kid’s demise?  I honestly felt like a loser for unknowingly integrating peanuts into what is suppose to be “a peanut free zone.”

The reality is that people who are allergic to peanuts should be put in special schools and forced to live in special parts of the world like Canada so that we can rebuild a society that isn’t susceptible to calamity when it is exposed to a nut.  My kids should be able to take a snickers (even though snickers suck and Milky Way are way better) dip it in peanut butter and encase it with Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups and eat away at snack time, but they can’t.  I would refrain from standing for the national anthem out of protest to our countries current peanut stance but I’d probably be sending the wrong message and people would think I was protesting about something that doesn’t matter.