An odd thing happened at Food Lion the other day. I was in the cereal aisle looking for a box of Honey Nut Shredded Wheat when I started listening to the song that was playing overhead. The lyrics were as follows:

“I’m gonna live I’m all right,

I’m gonna die it’s all right,

I’m ok.”

As it turns out, the song is called “That’s Some Dream,” by Good Old War. It has a sort of Simon and Garfunkel-meets-Green Day vibe to it, and as I listened to the chorus being sung over and over, I was struck by the utter strangeness of the situation. There I stood between walls of Post and Kellogg’s cereal boxes, with brightly animated honey bees and frogs and tigers trying to spoon me a bite of their corn flakes, listening to a song about life’s transience and the inevitability of death.

There are places you expect to hear songs like this. Your friend’s car, Pandora, the coffee house down the street… Food Lion is not one of them. Since when do supermarkets play anything but musak? Maybe I haven’t been listening hard enough, or maybe the Billboard Top 100 blends itself into something akin to white noise. Maybe the Food Lions and the Krogers and the Randall’s have decided to shake things up a bit and give shoppers a little dose of existential crisis as a part of some twisted bargain deal. If that’s the case, I have to question their logic. How is a song that embraces death supposed to motivate Shopper A to buy any of the thousands of life-giving products that dominate their shelves? On the one hand, the tune was mildly upbeat; on the other hand, the lyrics seemed to suck all light out of the fluorescent fixtures up above.

It was a surreal two minutes, and by the end of it, I still hadn’t found my Shredded Wheat. Which could explain why things felt so dreary.