Wednesday, March 28, 2007

Escaping The Cheese Wars


I'm walking down the street enroute to procure the green stuff. I push past the doors to the warehouse and am instantly assaulted... by a blast of frigid air. My previously 98 degree skin locks up and I draw up short for a split second before pressing on. I avoid looking from side to side because to make eye contact now would be dangerous. My quarry is just 30 feet away, I quicken my pace to the spot. I reach up, grab the container and shake off the condensed water. I make to leave, but as I turn my eyes drift across one of the shelve's other residents - a tub of dill veggie dip, before I can even comprehend my own betrayal, the dip is in my basket.

As I continue shopping it squats down there in the basket. Staring up at me balefully as if to say, "You -know- I'm going to taste great with those carrots and celery." Bolstered by my own frailty against buying any -other- senseless dairy, pasta, rice or potatos (all my favorites) I carry on with the air of a tarnished hero, stalking through the great marble halls of this citadel of earthly sin. Past the EasyMac and the Stoufers frozen dinner platters, past heaps of golden chips and gem toned packages. To my last and most difficult herculean task in this remote corner of the fortress... the flat of Aquafina Water Bottles. Heaving it into my cart I attempt to make a hasty retreat... but the weight of the water has caused the as-of-this-moment suspended fourth wheel of the cart to touch down. And now it fights me. Hissing and and caterwauling as it tries to pull me off course to the left. Smacking into heaps of paper and leaping out at the fortress' thralls - dim eyed people who look up in abject terror as the beastly cart surges towards them.

I fight the beast for what seems like an eternity before slotting it into a corral and offloading it onto my own shoulders. I escape beaten but unscathed back into the 98 degree heat prefering its unrelenting gaze to the temptation of the block fortress known as Wal*Mart that haunts me still.

It seems appropriate to start my journey northward with a solid, visual reminder of what I left behind to begin with. I took a trip to Talkeetna last summer, it was an Alaskan-Sweltering 85 degrees out. At the time I had no thoughts at all (heatstroke does that to you), but traveling back in my mind I resist the urge to rant and rave for having left at all if I was just going to go back.

Because afterall, you never can go back to a place. That saying about never stepping in the same stream twice comes bounding back into my mind.

So now it's 'Good bye Tennessee, thanks for all the sweet tea.'
Now if only they had decent fish
.