I knocked off early last Friday afternoon. Had some friends coming over for dinner and needed to pick up a few things, namely groceries and the crap I'd strewn all over my apartment. Little did I know that mid-afternoon is family hour at Safeway. Instead of the usual crash derby of bachelors wandering around with plastic baskets and snatching a few items in no particular order, the market was full of Martha Stewart housewives shoving heavily-laden carts down each isle of the store with their alphabetized shopping lists and coupon wallets while their Stepford children sat in their carts with expressions of subdued woe.

I can't decide which is more surreal.

One of the offspring, who apparently had been a few days too long since his last beating, broke the eerie silence - and broke it pretty good. "MOMMY!" he'd bellow, while his mother, eighteen inches away, pointedly ignored him. "MOMMY!" Two seconds of calm. "MOMMY!" Two more seconds. "HEY MOMMY!" Finally, she glares at him and asks him, through clenched teeth, what's the matter. He stretches sideways in the seat, points a stubby finger at the woman behind them, and exclaims:

"THAT LADY LOOK JUST LIKE BUGS BUNNY!"

His mother turns more scarlet even than the buck-toothed matron, whose curlers do, in fact, look a lot like rabbit ears. She's so embarrassed she neglects to smack the child. Two minutes later, I hear "MOMMY - WHY THAT LADY SO FAT?" In the produce section, it's "THAT LADY SO OLD SHE LOOK LIKE A MONKEY!" It's then she yanks the child out of the cart and leaves her heap of groceries unattended as she bolts for the door. Two thoughts occur to me: first, if kids can be that cool, maybe I should reconsider my own reluctance to breed. Second, of course, is that I wasted a whole lot of time before I started doing the same thing on the Internet.