Happy As Kings

“The world is so full of a number of things, I’m sure we should all be happy as kings.” R.L. Stevenson

The pharmacy line at my local Safeway forms in the hair products aisle. From one end to another, hair products. Pomades, dyes, shampoos, conditioners, smoothing sprays, anti-frizz cream, things to calm your hair, plump your hair, fix your tragic hair issues.

Standing there waiting to pick up a prescription, I had a thought.

“Remember soap?” I thought. Remember when the products in the bathroom were just toothpaste, bar soap, and shampoo – and that was it? Maybe a jar of Camay cold cream if you were fancy.

Now the onslaught of things has my head spinning. Why are there so many things? Do all old people feel like this? One minute you have 4 choices of bar soap (five if you count Lava, the soap with actual rocks embedded in it), and the next you have 300 types of hand soap in scents like “Rain,” “Fresh Linens,” and “Spring Morning,” all of which have the aroma of a urinal cake at a biker bar.

For me, I think it started when I went to Grocery Outlet twice in one day. Grocery Outlet is where weird, odd and quirky products go to die. When you walk in, you never know what you are going to find. Banana-Blueberry Cheerios. Vegan cheese slices with jalapeños. Seven varieties of cauliflower crust pizza.

You have to read every product label carefully because things that may seem at first to be familiar products almost always have some twist. You think you’re getting your regular dish soap, and you get it home and find that it is chile-lime dish soap.

It starts to be overwhelming, all of the endless variety. I was in the coffee aisle and I spotted coffee pods that were strawberry chocolate coffee flavor and I broke down sobbing. “No one needs strawberry chocolate coffee!” I howled, clutching my sideburns.

No, I didn’t really, for two reasons: one, because I’m not on an episode of Real Housewives where people have inappropriate outbursts over stupid things in public, and two, because I trimmed my sideburns too short to clutch. But what I did do is shake my head sadly, thinking about the wasted human effort involved.

I mean – someone thought of strawberry chocolate coffee, and got someone to approve making it. They put together a project plan and a budget and got a project manager or two and had meetings and a timeline and a calendar and deliverables and created an identity and picked a color scheme and developed packaging and developed the product and tested it and marketed it and went into full production and packaged it and put it on trucks and sent it around the country and WHY? WHY? It’s strawberry chocolate coffee, people, someone should have stood up and yelled “STOP! WHAT ARE WE DOING HERE? THIS IS MADNESS!”

But no one did, obviously, and now this sad product sits sadly on Grocery Outlet’s sad shelves, selling for $2.99 (soon to be $2.47, then $1.99, then $1.47) and making me sad.

Perhaps I shouldn’t let strawberry chocolate coffee make me so sad. It’s just the sheer muchness of things, so many things, the endless gaping needs we create for ourselves and then attempt to fill. We’re like Navin in the movie “The Jerk”:

“I don’t need any of this stuff. I don’t need this. All I need is this ashtray…and this paddle game…and this remote control, that’s all I need…and these matches. The ashtray, the paddle game, the remote control and these matches – they’re all I need. This lamp…the ashtray, this paddle game, the remote control, matches and this lamp. That’s all I need.”

When I was living in Gladis (my 23-ft Class C RV), I got bounced out of the world of muchness, simply because I had no room. If I wanted a new coffee cup, I had to get rid of one of my other coffee cups because there was no space in the tiny cabinet for another.

I remember walking around a street fair in Phoenix, looking at the arts and crafts and thinking “I don’t need…anything.” Everything was so bright and shiny and dazzling, and so unnecessary to me at the time.

Then I moved into my little single-wide mobile home and it seemed so big, and stuff started to encrust on me like mussels on a pier piling. I have three teapots and one teakettle in this house, for one person. Of course two of them are for sale in my Etsy shop, but that doesn’t change the fact that they are here, taking up space. I battle against stuff, but stuff gets the better of me.

I’m not sure what I’m exactly trying to say. Maybe come over for coffee and we can talk about it. I bought some that is pistachio-coconut flavor that you’re just going to love.