jennings rampage

One slice at a time.

Look, when you get to be my age (30, if you round up), you start to know what you’re looking for from life. And if you’re like me, it’s the simple things that you have to have the way you have to have them — I don’t suffer bad movies, I don’t bother with subpar television, and I’ll be damned before I eat a steak cooked a heartbeat past heart-still-beating.

So, after twenty-six years on this planet, I finally found my loaf of bread: a wheatberry loaf from my Whole Foods baked locally with all organic ingredients and whole grains. (And really, if you’re not eating bread that’s baked locally in a bakery from good ingredients and no preservatives, what the fuck is your problem?) Oh, how I could go on about this loaf of bread, about it’s soft texture, the gentle nuttiness of the wheatberries, how it’s perfect gently toasted with a schmear of fresh pesto or a bit of German mustard and sliced turkey or as the ideal delivery system for a fried egg in the form of a bullseye/egg in a basket/whatever your mom called it growing up. It’s good bread.

And then Whole Foods stopped selling it. Well, it wasn’t behind the counter at least, they said it wasn’t among their best sellers, so they stopped baking it regularly. You would not believe how upset I was. (You would be ashamed to know how upset I was.) But it was still available as a special order, all I’d need to do is call the bakery before I came in, they’d throw a loaf in the oven, and it’d be waiting for me when I got there.

I’m not that guy, though. I know what I like, and it’s the stuff that’s available in the display case, the stuff everyone else can get, the stuff that I don’t have to call in a favor for. I’m not the special order guy, I’m not the substitutions guy, I’m not the send-it-back guy.

But, oh, this bread! This heavenly loaf, this amazingly complex carbohydrate! Rhapsody, bliss! Oh, how I love this bread! I tried other breads, I tried the whole wheat, the rustic loaf, I tried, I swear I did. I even tried switching to microwave burritos for lunch, which was also not a good plan. No, I had to have my bread back.

Fine, I’ll call. But I won’t enjoy it.

The hella-cute lady baker seemed glad to help, though, and even thanked me for calling. Oh no, lady baker, thank YOU for giving me my bread back. Another small part of my life is back the way it should be.