DEBRIS.COMgood for a laugh, or possibly an aneurysm

After two days of restaurant food, including one day where I’d succumbed to the unwillingness of the world outside my kitchen to offer anything to eat that didn’t used to walk around and stink, I was desperate for a salad. The pickings were slim out there along highway 12, thousands of acres of grape vines and walnut trees notwithstanding, so we ended up at Safeway (regional supermarket chain) in Lodi, and I was sent inside to inspect the deli.

This store offered the traditional sandwiches-to-order station, plus, unusually I thought, a China Express takeout counter.

I acknowledged to the sandwich clerk that I’d seen the prepackaged salads, and asked if, in addition, the store offered an open salad bar. The clerk said no. Then, unhelpfully, he offered “But we’re having a special on Asian barbecued spareribs with peanut sauce, just $2.49 with your Safeway Club Card.” Why he felt that was relevant, I have no idea, but I stepped away before he recited any other of the day’s exciting sale events around the store.

We gathered all our food selections, queued for the checkout, and asked the cashier if she knew of a park in the area where we could eat. “Oh, I’m sorry, I’m not from around here. Let me ask someone else.” She relayed our query aloud to the next cashier, making our request a lot more public than I appreciated, earning me suspicious stares from all the locals in line around me, as if it was a wholly unnatural thing to seek a public picnic area on a Sunday afternoon. Or maybe they were reacting to my T-shirt, which depicted Iron Maiden’s grotesque mascot/gremlin Eddie with middle fingers on both hands raised toward the viewer, and a hand-drawn speech balloon proclaiming in ragged four-inch-high letters “LODI SUCKS!”

Ultimately no one was able to help us, because the entire staff of the Lodi Safeway commutes in from out of town, where they have no parks. But we found a suitable picnic area anyway, thanks to my eagle-eyed wife, who can apparently spot those brown “state park” signs while driving and conversing simultaneously in two languages. So we had a nice lunch, took a brief walk along the river, and, I don’t know, the world exploded or something, preventing me from finding a satisfying wrap-up to what has become a fairly tedious story.