What's in your cart?

We’ve all been there. 

You are at the store, a few unmentionables in your cart, when suddenly you run into someone you know in a casual or (worse yet) professional way. You cast a furtive glance down to the items in your basket and try covering them with your jumbo bag of chips bought just for the purpose of camoflage:  Tampons, a box of L’Oreal with a girl half my age on it, an E.P.T. (it’s for a friend), bleach for that  ahem-- facial hair, hemorrhoid cream, and other assorted ”feminine hygiene” doo-dads that I would do well not to mention. (I can only imagine the fate that awaits one purchasing adult incontinence products.)

Okay, so maybe one wouldn’t pick all of these sundries up in one fell swoop—especially not with that new chatty old dude they just hired at Walgreens as a checker.  But still, you know what I’m talking about.

One’s shopping cart tells many tales, and those checkers must know us very well, mustn’t they?  (Not to mention the Big Boxes in the sky which track all of our purchases.)  The checkers know if we’ve had a bout of the flu, are picky about our organic produce or let our kids gorge on pop-tarts.  They are the ones who know if we’re buying things on food stamps or purchasing yet another bottle of cheap wine or a box of Trojans.  (Note:  Do not buy those two things together.) 
I wonder if their tongues wag in the break-room or if there is some type of code, like doctors, which keep them from telling tales on the customers.

 

 

 

I recently wrote a shopping scene in my WIP which kindled a thought.

What’s in your hypothetical cart at the local Walgreens for Writers? If you were just popping in to pick up a short list of acoutrements necessary for the writerly life, what would those items be?  In my basket I’d have a few superlative, organically-grown adjectives; a really kick-ass thesaurus; a killer metaphor that everyone would, like, totally understand (without it being too obvious of course); a gynormous eraser the size of my head, and a “How to Land an Agent: touch-up kit”.  (It was a buy one get one kinda thing.)

Oh—and a cheap bottle of wine.

Would love to hear your grocery list of must-haves.  Go for it.  I won’t tell.

~Just Jill
http://alexjcavanaugh.blogspot.com/p/the-insecure-writers-support-group.html