Editor:
Every Spring I return home to 亚洲天堂 Lake. I come home to tree plant because it helps fund my globe trotting addictions and it also helps to finance my post secondary nuances 鈥� buying new textbooks which never get used, opened or looked at after my classes end.
Last week after a long, hot, and hungry day in the bush, the crew returned back to town and I desperately needed two things: coffee and food. So, I made the trip across town reminiscing about all the old buildings that are no longer present, such as the taxidermy, the Mohawk station and French鈥檚. I popped into the last gas station on the strip to get a large coffee to sip, savour and re-live my childhood excursions across town. I figured that was the best way to block out and forever forget about my awful, hot, and bug buffet filled day in the bush. I finished my coffee fast, the day was that bad!
Once, I arrived to the grocery store, I began hunting and gathering odds and ends from one side of the store to the other and I finished at the vegetables. There was one last thing I needed and it was broccoli. While standing in front of the cascading waterfall of green fauna, I grabbed a single head of broccoli, and a plastic bag, then I began the opening process. But after the first, the second and the third attempts being absolute failures, I tried alternative methods. First, I was rubbing the top of the transparent plastic bag together with my forefinger and thumb, then followed by blowing at the seams of both ends (you never can tell which is the right one, right?). As I began to combine both methods together, absolute panic struck: the large cup of coffee I drank earlier on my historic walking tour of town had decided that its time was up, the visit was over, and it was checking out, immediately! At this point all I wanted to do was to get this stupid head of broccoli into this silly bag, so that I can leave and find the nearest bathroom. But, first things first 鈥� this bag is opening and the broccoli is going inside! So, with my knees tightly pressed together, my feet shoulder width apart, I was fighting every urge to not do something that looked like the Macarena, or worst case scenario: losing focus and water cooling my pants. During that moment, I thought to myself that, 鈥淚 will win and this plastic bag will submit and open, leaving me the victor.鈥�
The bag won. I lost. But, I didn鈥檛 lose to the sophisticated evacuation plan imposed by the gross volume of coffee I drank. No, I lost because I was not about to extinguish a non-existent fire in the produce section of the grocery store.
I put the broccoli down, dropped my grocery basket with the bag on top of everything (unopened, of course) and I found myself not speed walking, but running directly to the bathrooms.
If I have learned anything from this experience, it is not that coffee should be enjoyed in moderation (oh no), it is not that those plastic bags are there only for the fruit or vegetables. Nope, they are there to mock you, intimidate you, or better yet, to humiliate you by possibly making you pee your pants.
Tyler Caplette
