Yesterday after work I dropped into publix and bought 15 little baskets of strawberries. They were on sale for 99 cents each
and they will be used in my next batch of mead. When I went to the checkout lane I piled up my goodies and watched the cashier guy eyeball them as he rang it up. When I swiped my card and paid for my purchases
There was a slight delay between the receipt printing out and when I paid. The cashier looked down at the machine and said 'Just a second. The system is old and slow. Like me. Har Har Har. The guy was my age. I felt like punching him.
Last night I watched 'Hearts in Atlanta'
the movie made after the Steven King book. I thought it sucked
but then again the book sucked too. I recall reading that when I took a trip out west. I would have ditched it
but it was the only thing I had to read at the time. So I chewed through it. The book touched on Kings 'Dark Tower' series
a series that I pretty much despise. The movie did not touch on it at all
thus it left out the vast majority of the supernatural elements and just left a boring coming-of-age story.
On Saturday I had picked up all the garbage that blew on my front lawn. When I got home
most of it was back. I am starting to get a sneaky suspicion that the yard workers at the mental hospital across the street are using those big blower guns to blow all the garbage off of their lawns and onto mine. I do not know this for a fact
I just have a grudging suspicion. I am going to try and forget it and just pick up the garbage. Otherwise I'll gnaw on it like an old dog with a bone until I turn into one of those old fat mu-mu ladies who loudly bitch and moan over exaggerated indignities. Then I will end up pounding on the front door and complaining to a receptionist who has nothing to do about lawn maintenance about the empty big mac wrapper I found on my lawn.
I miss those Styrofoam containers all McDonalds food use to come in. Yeah
they were hell on the environment
but they kept your food nice and warm. I think some of the breakfast thingies still come in Styrofoam. I never liked though
however. The wet floppy thing McDonalds passes off as a pancake is a travesty.
That reminds me
I saw signs around town for a pancake breakfast at the civic center this weekend. I have no clue what it is but I imagine a buncha old folks making huge batches of pancakes and of I getting a stack so tall it wobbles. I might drop in this weekend and have a peek.
2026 Update
I dial back to 2006 and find Ed hoarding strawberries for mead and blaming mental-hospital lawn crews for his trash.
In 2006, a card swipe took a full three seconds, and Ed wanted to punch a cashier for joking about his own age. Now we tap our phones and the terminal says 'approved' before we've even noticed the delay, but the rage remains, just aimed at the subscription fee for the app that holds the loyalty card. The 99-cent strawberry basket is a fairy tale; today you pay triple for a clamshell of berries that taste like damp cardboard, which is appropriate, because McDonald's pancakes still taste like damp cardboard, only now they come in eco-friendly packaging that makes them soggier. The mental hospital's leaf blowers have gone electric, quieter and somehow more irritating, but Ed wouldn't have to suspect anyone—he'd just film the litter and post it to the neighborhood app, where the real fight begins. And 'Hearts in Atlanta'? That book is now a limited series on a streaming service you have to subscribe to, and you'd still hate it. The more things change, the more Ed finds something to gnaw on.
“2006 Ed, when the cashier joked that the system was old and slow, like him, was your first thought really to punch him, or were you just annoyed that he wasn't moving fast enough for your fifteen baskets of strawberries?” — Beelzebubba the Third
2006 Ed: Well, Beelzebubba, I reckon it was a little of both, to be honest. Fifteen baskets of strawberries, that’s a lot of little green baskets cluttering up the conveyor belt, and I was already doing the math on how much honey and water I’d need, so my patience was thin. But no, I didn’t really want to punch him. That was just the heat talking, plus the fluorescent lights in Publix always put me in a foul mood. The joke wasn’t even that bad, just one of those old-guy self-deprecating things, and I’m the same age, so it stung a little. Made me think about my knees. Anyway, I got my strawberries home and started crushing them, and by the time the kitchen smelled like fruit and yeast, I’d forgotten all about the slow system and the slow cashier. Take that, foul germs.
