today i had lunch at petsmart.

Trip report for Monday: woke up, had a Kashi whole-grain waffle and a cautiously tiny bowl of some incredibly fiber-rich cereal, the content of which appears potentially explosive; took a freshly-shaven Siberian Husky for an hour-long walk in the desert; went to Costco and watched my dad buy a few things that included a 9ft plastic Christmas tree, and then receive a $300 rebate (more than I spend on groceries in a month) at the checkout register (we still spent $44); became semi-stranded at a Guitar Center for 3 hours where the soundtrack was Disc 2 of The Essential Iron Maiden on infinite repeat; eventually I had to leave in order to try and have just a few minutes of something coming into my ears that was not Iron Maiden ...

...but then I realized that, gadzooks, Iron Maiden was being piped into the parking lot. Normally an awesome thing, it's true, but today my desire for greasy British metal had already been thoroughly sated. The rest of me, however, was far from it (this last transitional bit reminds me of the abominable Amsterdam food writer the Undercover Glutton, pleeeeeeeease shoot me). I hadn't eaten since my waffle, so I went on a on a pitifully unpromising Quest for Food in the Quintessential American Strip Mall.

My options included: the Costco (except not really because I didn't have Dad's Costco card and therefore would be turned away at the door); Guitar Center; Mattress World; Staples Office Supplies; PetSmart; and a Kyoto Bowl noodle house that wasn't open. There was also a restaurant seriously named Guam Cuisine, no kidding. They must use a tractor beam to get people into the restaurant because no American I've ever heard of would willingly enter a restaurant with that name (EDIT: sorry, it's actually called Island Roots Guam Cuisine, but the big sign on the side of the building that alerted me to the fact that it was a tractor beam-wielding restaurant in the first place does say "Guam Cuisine").

I ended up getting a (I just imagined making an ellipsis here that stretched for about four page lengths) Starbucks Frappuccino out of the checkout isle cooler at PetSmart (the bottled version, not the Britney version...160 calories). There's not much else to say about this lunch other than Possible Low Point of Trip.

Although: probably not as Low a Point as the people who were working in these completely empty retail megastores were probably having. Muzak, A/C, fluorescent lights, a uniform, and...billions of pet products. Or office supplies. Maybe flourescent lights would've helped, which is what I originally typed, hah haha haha hahha. Thanks, Google Toolbar. Anyway, who knows, maybe they were on meth and having a great time. I just assume that's the case when I'm in Phoenix and I run into something that doesn't seem like an explainable way to live.

Annnnnnnnnnywayyyyyyyyy, I was becoming mildly bummed out about the proportion of my extremely full schedule that was being blown away by my guiltily loitering around this strip mall (guilty not because I'd done anything wrong [yet], but because of the 28 No Loitering signs that seemed to hover around me as I pointlessly shuffled from pointless superstore to pointless superstore), until I realized: when I am I going to have a chance to do this again? Make the most of it.

But how? No idea. Whippits? Thankfully, no. Eventually I was able to identify Dad's pickup out of the more-than-a-little-creepy crowd of identical pickup trucks circling the parking lot looking for stray pre-teens to abduct for organ harvesting (I'm sure I'm kidding), and the "being alive" part of my day was rejoined already in progress. We zoomed 12 miles away to the previously mentioned El Nopalito, and returned home with a pile of real Mexican tacos that were just perfect. We got a bunch of other stuffs too, but the tacos (plus the guacamole and the ancho-spiked red salsa to go with them) were the highlight for me.

A curious bonus: enough plastic cutlery for Earth, Wind, and Fire at their most populous.

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