Save the ?

The other day I was doing a little grocery shopping at the local Kroger’s. I was meandering up and down the aisles minding my own business, loading up my cart with normal food.

You know.

The food that isn’t "Lite", "Low Carb" "High Carb" of "Fat Free".

Guy food.

I had just picked up a few cans of tuna and tossed them into my cart when a woman who was next to me in the aisle "Tsked" at me.

"What?" I asked.

"You’re really not going to buy that tuna, are you?"

"What’s wrong with ‘that tuna’?" I asked.

"Well, that’s the wrong tuna!"

Ok. Here we go. The wrong tuna...

"What are you talking about?" I asked.

"Don’t you know, that that tuna isn’t dolphin-friendly!"

Dolphin-friendly?

"What, if I may dare to ask, is ‘dolphin-friendly’ tuna?"

I should have seen it coming. She wound up for her big lecture by taking a deep breath and putting on a "I’m an intellectually deep thinker" look and began...

For five minutes she harangued me about how the Japanese tuna fishermen catch dolphins in their nets and kill them, whereas the ‘dolphin-friendly’ fishermen don’t do that. So, in buying only dolphin-friendly tuna, I’m saving the dolphins.

Heh?

She finished her little speech and looked at me with a self-satisfied little smirk on her puffy face. I took a deep breath and let it out.

"Gee. I never knew that." I said.

"See, you have to be more socially aware!" She beamed.

"I do have one question though." I said, and she nodded her head and smiled expectantly just waiting to spew out more of her little nuggets of wisdom on me, this poor, uneducated part of the unwashed masses.

"What about the tuna?" I asked.

"What?"

"You heard me. What about the tuna? Don’t you care about them? They’re caught in the nets too. Don’t you want to save them?"

"I, I, I," Was all she could utter with a slightly stunned look on her rapidly reddening face.

"Oh, I see. Denis Leary was right. You guys only want to save the cute animals. I guess Charley the Tuna never had his own show on TV in the 60’s, so fuck him, right?" I asked.

No reply, just a shocked and blank stare.

"Lady, if I really wanted your advice, I’d have asked for it."

I then grabbed four more cans of the evil non-dolphin friendly tuna and tossed them into my cart to go along with the two cans already there and walked away, leaving her standing in the middle of the aisle staring at me in amazement. Opinions are like assholes, everybody has them.

So what.

I killed Flipper for a tuna sandwich.



Copyright 2005 Thomas J Wolfenden