Not a shopping list.
Here is a list I was scrawling on the back of a postcard on the bus ride home the other day. I was assembling this list for very important reasons related to the creation of very important cultural products:
- Zebra cakes
- Fancy cakes
- Star Crunch
- Skyline chili (frozen, canned or drive-thru)
- Mr. Gatti’s pizza
- Hostess fruit pies
- Kroger-brand fruit pies
- Little Caesars pizza
- White Castles
- Shoney’s breakfast buffet
- Totino’s Party Pizza
- Ale-8-1
- Vanilla Coke
- Vanilla Cherry Coke
- Kroger-brand French Silk pies
- Steak-N-Shake steakburgers
- Jerry’s J-Boy steaks
As is often the case on the bus I ride, there was a beautiful young downtown St. Paul nonprofit worker sitting next to me. She wasn’t peering over into my lap, exactly, but she was glancing at my list, as you inevitably do when you’re in such close quarters and someone is writing big loopy script next to you. Maybe I was just imagining this, but I thought she looked a bit horrified.
It occurred to me she might have thought I was making a shopping list, and if this was a shopping list, it would be the most hilariously pathetic shopping list imaginable, especially for a grown man that is clearly in his early- to mid-30s.
I thought maybe I should explain myself, but decided against it. If she wants to think I am hoarding filling up my pantry with Hostess fruit pies and Vanilla Coke, I guess there’s worse things for people to think.
Come to think of it, I hope she nicknamed me “Fancy Cakes” in her head, because that is a pretty good nickname. “Here comes Mr. Fancy Cakes,” she might think to herself whenever I board the bus.
