A Psychotic Episode at Winco

I want to talk about pop. Soda pop. I need a Frankenstein breather.

For years, I have witnessed this phenom which I am about to describe. Yet I have never stopped to ponder it until last night.

I pondered it because as I stood in the eternal line of 12 items or less at the grocery store, I began counting the shoppers ahead of me, many with 30 items or more. Rather than club them to death or say nasty things, I pondered. That's new for me. And as I pondered, I noticed at the checkout counter that they have those little bottles of Diet Pepsi in those little coolers-my drug of choice.

There was a tag that said a twenty ounce bottle was only 1.39.

Yet here I was in that glacial line, holding a giant 67 oz bottle of Diet Pepsi. It cost only 1.00. And for a moment, I felt like a criminal. How could this be? With my intensely mathematical mind, doing quick calculations (although I certainly didn't need to) I should have been paying something north of 4 bucks for this loot. Was this the deflation that those CPI guys were talking about?

And as my mind drifted, I thought about bootlegging Diet Pepsi. I mean, couldn't I simply fill up some re-usable 20 oz. bottles, fill them from those enormous bottles, sell them at 59 cents apiece and still make 100% profit? Isn't that the American dream? Find a niche and exploit it?

Any time you can make a 100% profit margin, that is a good deal.

Then I thought, why do people buy those small 20 oz. bottles? Do they think, "Hey, let's be as stupid as we can and pay three times as much for something that is a useless and damaging drink in the first place! This is America!" Then it dawned on me.

Of course. We are idiots and we are lazy idiots to boot. We can't be concerned with these little distractions like wasting our dough- as we lead our enormously important and desperate lives.

People just don't like lugging those three pound bottles around and worse yet, there is no way in hell my drink holder could handle that behemoth. Pop everywhere. Then it hit me. Had I ever seen a drink holder that could accommodate enough pop to float an oil tanker? Yes, maybe.

Those Range Rovers have little fridges in them. But they cost a shade over 50k. That is kind of a drawback.

You know what? You get a Ph.d from me in multi tasking if you can figure out a way to hold one of those giant things, steer and shift, run your navi and satellite radio, put makeup on, talk on your cellphone, occasionally bitch at other drivers while reloading a magazine or two, and not die in a fiery crash.

Eventually, I snapped out of my psychotic break and I was able to conjure up enough where with all to greet the cashier and pay for the 13 items I was holding because I never get a basket. That's how it is for us genius types. We can't be distracted by such things.