Welcome to the Jungle

Newsletter 2023-08-20

Fun looks different in your thirties. In my last newsletter, I told you about how I watched the Pride and Prejudice movie and miniseries with my wife Lola as part of her birthday week festivities. That ended up being more of a gift to myself than to her because Jane Austen is a girl boss who slays in all situations. I have no idea if I used any of those words correctly. My kids banned me from using slang for a reason. Friday, the week got even better. That’s when Lola and I took the day off work for her real birthday gift. She could have asked for a day trip to anywhere in the world. Well, anywhere in the world within driving distance so that we could leave after the kids got on the bus and get home before they went to bed. There were dozens of wineries, spas, and even amusement parks within our range. Lola rejected all of those. Instead, she picked the one thing she truly wanted to do to celebrate another year of being alive: We went to the grocery store.

This wasn’t just any food outlet. It was a really big one. Jungle Jim’s is located just outside Cincinnati. I used to avoid naming specific businesses for fear of getting sued for slander or, worse, missing out on money by giving away free advertising. Neither is as much of an issue as I once believed. I don’t lie (more than necessary), and I don’t drive extra sales for anyone, either. Don’t tell my potential advertisers that. It’s definitely a great idea to pay me huge sums to tell my geographically scattered audience about your in-person-only business on the edge of Ohio. I’m sure someone will fly in from Sydney for that sale on potatoes. Half off is half off.

Lola has been dreaming about this grocery store for our entire marriage. Her sister lives close to it and has spoken often of its wonders. In all that time, we never made the extremely reasonable drive to check it out. Why not? Because we have groceries at home. Close enough to home, anyway. There are plenty of grocery stores within a mile of our house. It would have to be a really good deal to justify a four-hour round trip for our weekly food haul. My minivan is amazing in many ways, but gas mileage isn’t one of them. Besides, I shouldn’t quadruple my contributions to global warming to save thirty cents on frozen chicken nuggets. Then again, maybe I should. It would help them thaw faster.

Jungle Jim’s isn’t where you go for regular groceries. It’s a place to splurge. It specializes in weird, hard to find items you can’t get at your local Walmart or Kroger. The store itself isn’t as big as you might think given its status as a vacation destination. It’s hard to get an exact sense of the size because the interior layout is weird and I have zero spatial awareness. It’s like a labyrinth, but with squid chips instead of a minotaur. It has roughly the dimensions of a standard Super Target, only without the clothes. This place has food and beverages from end to end. That last part was key. At least a third of the building was a liquor store, which was the real reason Lola wanted to go. There’s no limit to the distance we’ll travel to get buzzed on a slightly different mix of flavors.

If you drink a bottle of the same wine every night, you have a problem. But if you drink a glass each of four different wines, you’re a connoisseur. Variety is the spice of life and also the greatest antidote against guilt and basic self-awareness. That’s why going to wineries and breweries after church is socially acceptable while going on a Sunday afternoon bar crawl is not. We convince ourselves that we’re in it for the flavor, not the alcohol, and everyone else buys into that lie so they have more chances to get a little tipsy, too. Lola doesn’t drink much by any means. She’s a small person. If she actually consumed what I consider to be normal quantities of any liquid, she would die. But she very much enjoys sampling a wide spectrum of beverages that all taste more or less the same to me. A sommelier will tell you that there are thousands of different wines, but in reality, there are two: red and white. Any distinction beyond that is just pretense. I see through the illusion only because I don’t need it as an excuse to drink. I embrace my status as a garbage person. I could be perfectly content gulping down the same crappy light beer at all social functions for the rest of my days. Life without shame is pretty great.

Other people, however, need the pretext of culture to justify having fun, which is why places like Jungle Jim’s liquor section exist. I’ve never seen so many different varieties of the same two wines in one place. While Lola mistakenly believes different wines taste differently, she acknowledges that the expensive bottles aren’t any better than the discount stuff. It all comes down to what tastes good to you. Lola is a big fan of discount wines, of which Jungle Jim’s had many. We quickly filled our cart with bottles of fermented grapes at closeout prices. They had quite a selection of beer and seltzers as well. While I fully understand that alcohol is alcohol, I’m not going to pass on a chance to stock up. The grocery store specialized in both the super cheap and the super weird, the latter of which was far more expensive than I would like. Some four-packs of craft brews went for twenty dollars. I’m not worth five dollars per can. I’m not worth five dollars per anything. I stuck mostly to the cheap stuff with the exception of one eleven-dollar six-pack that I still feel bad about. I’ll be second-guessing spending that money on my deathbed.

I grabbed a few other packs of medium-priced beer before I stumbled upon my ultimate discovery: alcoholic sugar-free Mountain Dew. Indiana Jones was less excited when he found the Holy Grail. I chug grocery store brand generic diet Mountain Dew by the two liter. My record is six bottles in a single afternoon of board games. Afterwards, I slept like a baby. Caffeine has no effect on me, which is probably why I’ve never gotten into coffee. I guzzle the generic diet Mountain Dew simply because I like the flavor. If I could find a caffeine-free version of it, I’d drink that instead. Maybe cutting out that extra ingredient would save me a few pennies. Diet soda is critical to my lifestyle since I lack self-control. If I’m not pumping calorie-free liquid through my system when hanging out in a snack-dense environment, I’ll eat everything, and I mean that literally. There’s no such things left over when I’m around. The massive quantities of diet soda I drink give my urinary tract a workout, but I can only assume that’s good for me. My kidneys appear to be in perfect working order, making them a few of my only parts that are functioning as intended. The sugar-free alcohol-full diet Mountain Dew is the same empty liquid I use to fill the void in my soul, but with a bonus of alcohol. It’s the best of all possible worlds, unless you’re concerned with my long-term health, in which case it will probably kill me. I bought four cases of the stuff, and that alone made the entire trip worthwhile. Now that I’ve made such a big deal about the exclusiveness of it, I’m sure I’ll probably see it in my local grocery store next week. If I do, I won’t complain. I’ll just add it to my stockpile.

We filled our cart with booze, then checked out and headed to the van to make room for food. We laid down the back row of seats and covered the van’s floor with cans and bottles. We had help. Our friends Peter and Lila contributed nearly as much as we did. That’s right: We turned a day trip to a distant grocery store into a couple’s double date. I cannot stress enough how cool we are. On the way to Cincinnati and back, we played a board game called Sherlock. I drove and the others read the clues as we talked out theories that were mostly wrong. I’m sure we only missed the mark because, unlike Missouri, Ohio doesn’t allow passengers to have open containers in a moving vehicle. Alcohol makes deductive reasoning go up and impulse control go down. It’s easy to solve the case if you get impatient and check the answers at the back of the book.

No trip will be complete without a medical emergency. When we loaded our two carts of alcohol into the van, I nearly took out my own legs. Cans of liquid are heavy. I needed to put them as far into the van as possible to make room for the rest of our glorious cargo. I picked up a case and leaned forward to the full extent of my reach, never noticing that my legs were already straight with my knees pressed up against the bumper of the van. My leg bent forward ever so slightly in the wrong direction, hyperextending my right knee. For those of you keeping track at home, that’s my good one. Actually, my less bad one. They both swell and prevent me from walking for days after I run, but the right one is mostly functional under other circumstances. I yelped in pain and sat down on a cooler. It was a few minutes before I could walk again. We still had hours of wandering the grocery store ahead of us. Unsteadily, I got to my feet. I took a few steps. As long as I didn’t straighten my legs all the way, I could manage. Somewhere in the distance, my health insurance provider breathed a sigh of relief. There would be no emergency room visit that day. Our grocery run was back on. We returned to the store.

Having acquired enough alcohol to last us three years (but that will probably be gone in three months) we focused on the foreign foods we can’t find at home. We picked up a bunch of exotic candy for the kids with labels in languages we don’t speak. Hopefully we didn’t buy them any cheerfully packaged poison. They didn’t get to come on the trip with us, but we can make up for almost any level of parental guilt with sugar bribery. In reality, the kids barely noticed we were gone. We left after they were already at school. Our absence wasn’t even a mild inconvenience to them until they had to heat up their own chicken nuggets for dinner. Modern living is tough. We found quite a few other goodies. I grabbed some diet soda varieties I’d never seen before as well as three grocery bags full of hot sauce bottles. I’d let my supply of spicy condiments at home dwindle down to zero in anticipation of this trip, and the available options did not disappoint. My digestive system will never forgive me. Peter picked up supplies to make a fancy ramen dinner at my request. My oldest daughter, Betsy, has been going on and on about it for months ever since she had it at a restaurant with a friend. It’s a shame she knows people who introduce her to new experiences. Peter can make anything, so I decided to lean on him when ramen supplies were readily at hand. I cannot stress enough how bad of an idea it is to be my friend. We left the store for a second time a few hours later with two carts full of goodies. It was easily our best vacation of the summer.

It’s weird how much fun I had at an excessively large grocery store. Anything can be an adventure if you go into it with the right attitude and sufficiently low standards. What’s not to enjoy about buying beer and hot sauce with the person you love and two friends who tolerate you more than most? Plus there was a bar inside that let us drink beer and wine while we shopped. That probably helped. I know where I’ll be going for my next birthday.

Anyway, that’s all I’ve got for now. Catch you next time.

James