COLUMN: Primal man: real good at killing, real bad at shopping
I firmly believe in today’s modern age where gender lines are many times blurred, and often people don’t understand their role in society, that someone desperately needs to invent a spider-killer for women.
Since prehistoric times when cavemen roamed the earth, assuming their wives let them out with their buddies, men have always been the chief destroyer of creepy-crawlies.
Which, by default, makes women the chief identifier of creepy-crawlies.
“Uh … uh … AAAAAAAGHHHHHH!”
This is of course followed by,”Over THERE – GET IT!”
The caveman would then calmly smash the offending bug and toss it out, with, of course, first taunting the woman with the dead, deformed bug body while leeringly remarking, “Sure you don’t want it?”
Obviously not amused, the cavewoman certainly replies,
“Get that THING away from me, if you want to see the daylight of tomorrow!
“I’m not joking!
“AAAAAAGHHHH, I hate you!”
Much like today’s man, Grog in the days of old never learned how far he could take a joke with Mrs. Grog. If he were still alive, he would still be paying off his misdeed by doing household chores and getting the groceries.
Grocery shopping to a man is like squishing spiders to a woman. Each wishes the other gender would just handle it so they wouldn’t have to think about it.
You see, much like Grog going out and hunting for food, modern man actually likes going to a grocery store because there is food. And beer. And Doritos.
Men just hate grocery shopping.
Mrs. Grog was satisfied when Grog actually came home early from clobbering the first moving dinner item he saw. That way he could take care of the frightening arthropod under the armoire.
But when today’s man goes grocery shopping, he has to take a list. And while he wishes it were as easy as a loaf of bread, a container of milk and a stick of butter like on Sesame Street, the dreaded shopping list is never that simple.
In fact, grocery lists contain things that fall into three categories.
First of all, it contains items never introduced to man, like artichoke hearts and guava.
The list also contains items that are way too broad. An item of question may be something simple like “eggs.” But it never says what kind. Medium? Large? Jumbo? What grade? What color? What animal, for crying out loud?
The last type of grocery list item is the highly descriptive, non-existent item, like you know, “the bacon in the green package with kind of a picture on it of a farm house or maybe a silo or, wait, no it’s a blue package and it says something about a valley on the label and it’s always on the left side of the bacon section, near the top. Just ask the meat guy and he’ll know what I’m talking about.”
As far as I’m concerned, bacon is bacon. And they wonder why we never bring home the right stuff.
So to make everything a little simpler for both genders, someone smart needs to invent a spider-killer for women.
The device needs to smash a bug, remove it from the premises, and clean the guts up while she watches from the safety of another room.
Either that or a grocery store for men.
Built by men, for men – and it would only have products on site that men can identify and retrieve to fulfill the prepared list.
There would, of course, be rules to what can be found in a man’s grocery store, a Man-Mart, or Mr. Kroger, or Saferthanherway.
1) The store must look like and be laid out like a hardware store.
2) There must be an endless variety of snack and beverage products, including several species of jerky on hand at all times.
3) For everything else, there can be no more than three varieties or brands of any product, all brightly labeled in one of the three primary colors. That way, “I need the red box of eggs” would suffice.
4) No tampons, no loofahs, no makeup, no conditioner, no items that look like sparkly goo. Leave that to the women.
5) A required isle for power tools and home electronics just for fun.
6) No coupons, no specials. This is just confusing.
7) Hate carrying a wallet? Optional barcode tattoos for the express line checkout.
8) Seasonal items appear in season only. Holiday cards must arrive in large quantities no more than a week in advance. There will only be one kind of card allowed per holiday. It will inevitably say “Happy _____ (fill in the blank). I love you honey!”
If men are from Mars and women from Venus, hopefully some of these ideas will help the two planets orbit more closely. In the meantime, maybe we should just stop taunting women with dead bugs.
Although it sure is hard not to.
Garrett Wheeler is a second bachelor’s student in technical theatre design. Send any comments or column ideas to wheel@cc.usu.edu.