A Young Man's Trip to the Supermarket

The thought shouldn't have even entered my mind.

I mean, it was a beautiful September day. I was preparing to go back to school, George Bush was still looking like an ass in the media as his first (and hopefully last) term wound to a close, and the Olympics were no longer the bane of my existence.

Yet, with so much going on, my mind was dominated by an insatiable lust for Lays sea salt and pepper chips that bordered on criminally insane.

There was nothing in the 192 to keep my obsession at bay. Microwave popcorn may have helped, but the microwave, a stalwart servant for the last five years,had sputtered and died the night before. Indeed, the old Gold Star had popped it's last kernel.

It was no use. My only recourse was to make the 10-minute trek to the 24-hour Dominion on College, and then purchase and devour said salted treats. Now before you condemn me for yielding to such a base and superficial desire, you should be brought up to speed on the pedigree of this particular flavour of chip.

Lays had a promotion where they would introduce a"Tastes of Canada" feature flavour for a limited time only, then replace it after a month with a new"Canadian" flavour. Once all three flavours had enjoyed their respective trial runs, Canadian fat asses from across this great land - myself among them - were to vote on which flavour would become a permanent member of the loving Lays family.

The sea salt and pepper flavour won with an emphatic victory. So you see, this flavour is not something cooked up by some meatbag with a marketing degree and a suit and foisted on a helpless populace. No my friends, this flavour was ordained by the public as a treat worthy of our consumption. What a decisive victory for the consumer!

Ah, but what of the competition? What sort of soft opponents did old sea salt and pepper have to take on to reach the acme of potato snacks? Vancouver smoked salmon? Corner Brook screech?

Well, one pretender was admittedly a lightweight; the oh-so Canadian flavour of ... Italian pizza. The justification was that the flavour was based on a recipe from Little Italy's own Capitol Pizzeria, but ultimately that meant nothing. Hostess tried pizza chips before. They sucked then, and they suck now.

However, the other offering was a worthy contender indeed: a four-cheese offering from Quebec! It had a sharpness and flavour that evoked fine cheddar and the surprisingly pleasing pungent odour of Parmesan. (I don't know what the other cheeses were. I mean it's all just this day-glow orange powder that stains your fingers, but it tastes like some kind of cheese, and that's good enough for me.)

Well, sea salt and pepper won out, and deservedly so. Now any of you who know how much I like cheese know that's a pretty damn bold statement for me to make. In fact, it can be construed as a betrayal of everything I stand for. There are, in fact, rumours that I locked myself in my room for days, writhing in torment and self-loathing, before I could accept my feelings for this hearty variation of the classic salt and vinegar chip. This is not true. I'm not a freaky goth who haunts Queen Street and listens to My Bloody Valentine records for sheer kicks. I knew that if a chip flavour could best a challenger which was imbued with the mustiness and character of four individual cheeses, it had to be damn good. I came to terms with that pretty quickly and moved on.

Besides, if I ever was locked away in my room for a discernible length of time, it would probably be because I was in my gitch playing vids.

Okay, that should be sufficient background. Suffice it to say, I made haste to the Dominion to sate my hunger.On the way I passed the Capitol Pizzeria, where they still proudly display a poster extolling the virtues of the second-rate potato chip seasoning their restaurant inspired. I was reminded of a Don King interview I saw on CNN earlier that day. He was waving two miniature American flags and ululating some nonsense about four more years of George Walker Bush. Some people just can't stop backing a loser.

When I arrived at the Dominion, I thought I might as well pick up the bare minimum of groceries required for sustenance. Those who know me are aware of my many harmless but awkward idiosyncracies. There's the overhand grab when drinking a pint of beer, and my insistence of eating the outside of a raw carrot in such a way that the inner core remains unmolested and ready for consumption at a separate time. Well, I also have the strange habit of eschewing the baskets and carts at a supermarket in favour of piling groceries as inefficiently as possible in my arms, making a real adventure out of navigating around the place.

I picked up some apples, some cheese (of course) and some other stuff. My arms were getting kind of full, so I decided to just get some yogurt and the chips, and then to get the hell out of there. I passed a guy in his mid-30s in a tie-dye rush T-shirt perusing the selection of toaster-ready frozen waffles. "Lame," I thought to myself and gave him a wide berth as I went on my quest for fermented milk that costs three bucks because it says "Yoplait" on the packaging.

Perhaps I am overly sensitive to people being in my personal space, but it seems every time I want to get yogurt, a couple of fat Portuguese stock boys are toiling at a sedated snail's pace and blocking the overpriced Yoplait and Danone products. I'm generally polite and unobtrusive, so I try and wait for them to finish, but I'm only so young and life is only so long that eventually I have to get pushy, which the Pinos always resent and it makes my trip to the Dominion all the less pleasant.

On may way back down the aisle, I notice a large box of miscellaneous products on a larger skid that some stock boy Pino decided to park right in the middle of the lane. Rest assured, no one was unloading the box,and if I went back now it would likely still be right where I left it, and untouched. This is a problem in most grocery stores, but it's an epidemic at the 24-hour Dominion on College.

Squeezing by the box, I notice the guy in the Rush shirt heading right for me. Didn't I just pass him as he was walking the other way looking at Eggos? Why the fuck is he in my way now? Anyway, he sees me, then scrambles out of the way to make room. (I'm pretty unimposing and innocuous, and I don't like fighting or even posturing, but ever since I started shaving my head I seem to get treated with a lost more respect, unwarranted as it may be.)

His willingness to acquiesce tempered my ire. I thought to myself that the guy had guts. Guts to wear a Rush shirt? Indeed, because while it was once rather pedestrian and boring to like classic rock, the mainstream has vilified the genre so much, only to fill the void with shitty rap or tepid bands using the singer/two guitar/bass/percussion setup made famous by classic rock bands. And yet these bands lack the technical chops or songwriting acumen to create anything that would come within 100 light years of More Than a Feeling.

The time had come to venture into the snack aisle, the Las Vegas of the supermarket. Outwardly colourful, fun and full of promise, and inwardly dead and vapid. But still you are hopeless to resist its charms.

Much to my surprise, the normally tight-fisted bunch at Dominion were offering a buy one, get one free sale on Lays chips. Though they marketed the event as"$2.49 for 1, $4.98 for 3". Guess the denizens of Little Italy are numbers people. However the sale was promoted, the message was received loud and clear. The potato chip display resembled a state-run neighbourhood store in Soviet-occupied Kiev circa 1979. There was a few bags of regular and rippled, plus the odd barbecue and ketchup. Not a bag of sea salt and pepper, or even dill pickle, was to be found.

The frenzy for cheap snacks, while falling short of the mob scene that would accompany the opening of an Ikea in the Middle East, had left me with no snacks worth buying. In a twisted way, the gluttony of my neighbours saved me from giving in to my basest of desires. So to all the shoppers at the 24-hour Dominion right across from the Mod Club Theatre (formerly the Corner Pocket pool hall), I give you a hearty thank you for helping me resist my primal urge for Lays Sea Salt and Black Pepper potato chips.

But I'm afraid that thank you also comes with a fuck you.

Because I really wanted those chips.