When I was a kid, we damned well stood in line at the supermarket and waited for the checker to key in each and every price for each and every item on the conveyor belt. You knew the price of everything in your basket because everything had a price tag stuck on it. Every box of Frankenberry cereal, packet of Pop Rocks, and six-pack of Tab evoked a particular rhythm from the register as fingers flew across the keys: *chik*cha*chik*chuggachugga* Your receipt was real paper, stamped with a cloth ink ribbon, and it didn't stink like that slick, heat-sensitive pseudopaper that streams out of the registers these days.
The checker exercised a skill, now long lost, of counting exact items and ringing up a multiple. Twelve cans of the same cat food were counted, rung up, and pushed on to the bagger. Nowadays the damned lazy checkers are more than likely to scan every damned can of cat food. If God hates you that day, each can will take three or four swipes past the damned scanner before you hear that blessed beep. The damned belt didn't have an "electric eye" to scoot it forward. We were at the mercy of the checker's attention and the checker's foot switch.
The bags? Paper of course! You could tell the smart, considerate baggers from the prick baggers by how often they double-bagged a heavy load of cans or frozen items. And no fancy-schmancy little handles either. You carried bags of groceries from your Ford station wagon into the house two at a time. Ice cream and meat got their own special little plastic bags.
After the checker had punched in the last item and told you the total (no flashy active matrix LCD screens blaring ads at you and announcing how much money you've "saved" by using your store card and maintaining the supermarket's shopping profile on you), everybody in line waited as your mom completed the check, handed it to the checker for her to scrutinize your mom's driver's license, ask if the information on the check was current, and then scribble a bunch of stuff on the front of the check. Inconsiderate shoppers whose IQs were surpassed by just about anything in the produce department (except maybe parsnips, which have got to be the dumbest damned vegetables), these clueless goat sodomizers would watch the whole process passively like a five-year-old watching pigs fuck in a pen at the county fair and would choose the moment of the final total announcement to wake up and start pawing through their titanic purse or fumble in their shirt pocket for their checkbook. How about writing everything but the total and your ham-handed "X" on the signature line in the aeon in takes for your load of Vaseline and cucumbers to be checked and bagged? I guess that's just too much to expect from you mental defectives. It all makes me want to reach back into time and slap those morons silly. These days, of course, I've grown so accustomed to the relative speed of the modern supermarket checkout experience that I have to practice deep-breathing exercises whenever someone starts counting out exact change or continually swipes their card with the magnetic strip the wrong way or stares blankly at the prompt without entering their PIN.
Way back when, to get cash outside of bankers' skimpy hours, you cashed a check at the supermarket. If you planned something for the weekend, you made damned sure you had enough money beforehand. The magic of ATMs and the usury of non-network ATM fees were still a way off.
In olden times, child safety seats didn't sap your pocketbook and take up seats in your land yacht. Kids were left to crawl around the family car and to bounce off the interior if you came to anything resembling an emergency stop. I had some experience with this, cracking the top of my head against the steel dash of the very same 1972 Chevrolet Blazer sitting on the street outside our house. The only lasting impression of the incident (so the doctors say) is a terrifying memory of the x-ray machine's aiming crosshair illuminating above me.
In my day, a few weeks before the Fourth of July, fireworks stands started popping up in parking lots and vacant fields. Each stand served as a harbinger of the fun to come. I yearned for the day that I would be old enough to buy fireworks all by myself. My parents and I would drive to a stand and walk up to its flat face. The screen they used over the front opening obscured the interior until you were nearly right up to it, the treasures they hid revealed only gradually. And what treasures they were! Ground blooming flowers, piccolo petes, and a zillion cones and tubes meant to shower your street with pretty sparkles. Along the back of the stand, they stacked the huge-mega-mondo boxes of fireworks for families who had a lot to spend on fireworks.
Back then, if you wanted to nail cardboard wings to your ground blooming flowers and have them fly 50 feet into the air, you could. If you wanted to stash a few piccolo petes to make bombs for blowing up your models and army men, you could. These days, the state's jackboot is crushing the life out of Independence Day, making wimpy excuses about injury and the potential for regional brush fires. Instead, they offer up safe spectator events badly choreographed to terrible music. The opportunity for fun like this is quickly disappearing:
"[Police] said [Misty Nichol] Jones accidentally dropped the [M-80] as she tried to toss it out a partially opened window as she rode as a passenger along Monte Vista Avenue in the vicinity of California State University, Stanislaus, at 4:30 a.m. She grabbed the device, he said, but dropped it again because it was burning her. This time the firework got lodged in the seat where she was sitting. It went off as she reached for it. 'She suffered significant damage to her buttocks and right hand,' "[police] said. 'There is the possibility of losing some digits.'" Modesto Bee, June 29, 2004
So what's the problem here? Harold Lloyd had his thumb and forefinger blown off. It didn't stop him from becoming a movie star. Now, as far as the buttock damage is concerned, I'm not sure exactly what to say. Jennifer Lopez might still just be a secretary in Jersey. Speaking of, I happened to watch a movie with Ms. Lopez recently. My wife sat through Raging Bull so I got to sit through Maid in Manhattan. I've got to say that I finally understood all the hoopla over the J-Lo posterior. Being a self-confessed "butt man", I'm glad to see a celebrity with such a prominent rear gain so much attention. The rest of the Jennifer Lopez package as presented, including brain and personality, sink her to hugely negative levels in my book, but anyhoo...
Here's more of the same sort of hijinks:
"SANTA ANA. William Tejada's family knows the 16-year old as a responsible teenager who is working 30 hours a week this summer to save money for a car. So when he walked into his home Wednesday morning with blood gushing from his right eye, family members never expected Tejada to have been hurt while trying to blow up a plastic bottle with fireworks. The teenager suffered a serious eye injury and deep cuts in his forehead and cheek when he lit a Piccolo Pete and stuffed it into an empty, 2-liter Coca-Cola bottle outside his apartment, said fire Capt. Anthony Espinosa. The injury was so severe that the boy might lose his sight in the eye, Espinosa said." Orange County Register
We might've popped our eyeballs out or mangled our buttocks, but by God, we had fun! This nation is devolving into a goddamned mob of simpering pantywaists.
Pakeha