Souricide. It’s Possible That I’m Easily Amused.

We pulled into the parking lot of the Intermarché. Olivier jumped out of the car while I grabbed the magic token that we use to unchain a shopping cart.

Yeah, chains. Magic tokens. See, the carts are all chained together at the grocery stores in France. You need to have a Euro coin or a magic plastic token to stick in a little slot, thus releasing the chain and granting you shopping cart privileges.

You can’t get your coin back until you chain it up again, so it kind of sucks as far as stealing a shopping cart goes. You know, because sometimes you need one to pull jackass stunts and pranks.

So, we walked around with our rented shopping cart and began tossing shit into it. Handing the list back & forth, neither one of us paying attention to what the other is putting in there.

We go stand in one of the two very long lines. It’s almost 7pm. The store’s about to close & one of the employees is walking around, corralling shoppers into the lines to hurry them out of the store.

Olivier checks out the list. “You got the capers?”

“Uh-huh,” I said, looking around.

“Okay. Didn’t we need asswipe?”

“Not yet,” I said. “I guess we haven’t been pooping as much. Maybe we should’ve gotten more salad.”

I was carefully watching the other shoppers, waiting for one of them to get into line behind us. I’m always on guard about this, since it is a horrible fact that they will stand too fucking close to me, agitating me until I get out of the store.

As I was looking around, protecting my bubble of personal space, something caught my eye.

Obviously, “souris” is fancy French talk for a mouse. It cracked me up. Maybe I was just so used to seeing “d-CON: Kills Mice,” which sounds so blunt, so toxic and scary. Just take a look at the d-CON package. What’s that? Why, it’s a fucking dead mouse.

“Souricide Fatal” with a picture of a cute little mouse on it boasting of “10 very attractive sachets” just makes me laugh. Come on, tell me that the mouse on the cover of the Souricide Fatal box doesn’t look like Rémy from Ratatouille.

Of course, I suppose all of those French shoppers standing in line got an even bigger laugh from the weirdo taking pictures of the pesticides.

I guess I can see how that might’ve been kind of funny, too.

“Turns out that funny smell was rat poison.” -Rémy, Ratatouille