Shopping sober

After waking up from a twenty-year bender I have no idea who I am. I mean, I have memories that informed me, a series of loose associations with various articles which define who I am. I have a motorcycle jacket, so somewhere there is a motorcycle. I wrote books, so there are accounts of the past two decades in print, getting dusty on the shelves. All of these objects prove that something existed before the last hangover, but it’s all the vague memories of a past life. Meanwhile, I’m standing in the toilet paper aisle, deciding whether she preferred the store brand with the baby ducks, the little white bunnies, or the swans on the front.

The pink haze had me in a thrall, wandering through the aisles of a grocery store like a recently risen coma victim, amazed at the inexplicable variety of Oreos and Pringles processed potato products. The breakfast cereal aisle gives me vertigo because I can’t decide if the new me is ready to act my age and buy a box of whole grain flakes with the taste and texture of sweetened sawdust, or if my newfound clarity warrants the marshmallowiest damn nutritional atrocity that Safeway has to offer. These seem like important decisions that a middle-aged man ought to be able to make on his own. It is, after all, a delicious part of this nutritious breakfast.

Living on a steady flow of high-octane ethyl alcohol for half of my life, my digestive system adapted to process drag racing fuel, not the nutritive pyramid of the four basic food groups. Beer had some sort of grain involved, whiskey was a corn derivative, Bloody Mary garnishes were as good as salad floating at the edge of a spicy smoothie, and a pint of cider suffered as a serving of fruit to stave off scurvy. As my digestive system attempted a hard reset, I found myself hungry, but I had no idea what I liked to eat. I could digest about a single eight ounce serving of food at a sitting, the rest I left on the kitchen counter to grow a bumper crop of food born illnesses as I picked at it late into the night.

Clean and sober, with so much newly discovered time every day, I decided to wander into the frozen potato section to contemplate French fries and tater tots. Shoestring, steak fries, tater barrels or hashbrowns? Am I secretly a seasoned curly fry fan? I don’t know if I’m into sweet or savory for snacking. Most of my legit nutrition came from nibbles off the service line fridge through a shift. I ate a slice of cheese, an olive, or tomato. I was damn good on a line, drunk off my ass, dancing somnambulant through breakfast, lunch, or dinner service. I ate whatever food I screwed up on the line, which is how I stayed thin. Well, that and the steady diet of coffee, cigarettes and sweetened corn liquor.

I don’t know how long I’ve been staring at the pudding cup section; long enough to unnerve the parents and children watching the strange ashtray stinking old man in the leather motorcycle jacket contemplating the fluorescent colors of “unicorn” flavored goo. I think I used to like tapioca, but I don’t even know why I am contemplating individually packaged desert products. I just needed toilet paper.

Ducks and bunnies, I kind of get. They’re fluffy and soft, and despite the innate squirminess, I can understand the subconscious association with quality bath tissue. Most ducklings are covered in shit anyway, and as harmless as rabbits seem, they are opportunistic omnivores. If you’ve ever seen a rabbit chomping away at a dead bird’s tiny cranium, the association with quality bung fodder gets a little more treacherous. I didn’t really want to carry a big supersize package of toilet paper around the store anyway, so I wandered off again, contemplating the bright orange cheese puffs on the endcap.

Twenty years as a cook, I understand the concept of food in general. I make it all the time. Even drunk off my ass I cooked dinner for the house every night. I may still suck at portion control, but I can balance plates three to an arm, forks over knives, farm to table, like nobody’s business. I worked a half dozen healthy hippy eateries over the years, and I make a mean massaged kale and quinoa tabouli salad. Probably the only thing that kept me from getting dumped near the end there was the fact that she didn’t have to deal with the kitchen much as long as I was around. I’ve spent hours in this very grocery store buying ingredients to make something spectacular, I’ve just never done it sober.

With a basket of basic ingredients under my arm, I returned to the bath tissue aisle to confront my greatest fear. Of course, swans are complete bastards. Floating around the surface of a serene lake, they might look graceful and gorgeous, but up close they are brutal, vicious evolutionary throwbacks built out of pillows and leftover dinosaur parts. You only see a single mated pair on most ponds because otherwise, they go monster titan on each other, battling like Kong and Godzilla over a swank set of reeds to mate in. I’m not sure if I want to expose my holiest of holes to such an unholy monster.

Get home ranting about work, cook dinner, and pass out on the couch watching TV. I was like a whiskey stinking poltergeist with culinary aspirations, banging dishes around in the kitchen while I moaned about my coworkers. She picked a protein, and I made the rest happen like magic. I sleepwalked through the motions in our tiny kitchen, elaborately dressing the plates to compensate for my obvious intoxication. She took pictures of my dishes and posted them to the internet while I snored away alone on the love seat. Sobriety might be a significant improvement, but I still had no idea what sort of fluffy totem animal I wanted to associate with my own seat.