a run-in with jock itch

i took my weekly trip to CVS to buy $75 worth of things i don’t really need but also really do need. i roamed the aisles perusing the sections meticulously, determined not to ask an employee for help. i’m smart and i’m resourceful — i don’t need AI or chatGPT or for someone to guide me to the athlete’s foot cream when it’s right in front of me. i don’t have even one last “oh my God, i don’t know how i didn’t see it” plea of embarrassment left in me. i’ll spend all day in there if i need to.

i went to the itchy cream section first like a lot of us would. there was a cute guy standing in front of the itchy creams. we made eye contact and i smiled. we were both itchy and looking for cream. maybe this will be a meet-cute moment. his eyes swiftly turned dark and wide when they met mine. he kept glancing between me and the shelf in fear, anxiously looking down at his phone. i stood there scanning the creams, determined to take a good, hard look at every single one, wholly devoted to my quest. an air of awkwardness began to surround me and cute guy, but i ignored it. after a few long minutes the tension finally burst, and cute guy reached his arm out in front of me and snatched the jock itch cream, then speedily walked away. i stood there slowly nodding to myself. he has an itchy jock. my mind took a long pause. i hadn’t really considered what jock itch entailed until that moment. it’s probably kinda like athlete’s foot on your jock. what a bummer.

to no luck, i decided to try the next aisle over. who do i see when i turn the corner? but itchy jock guy. it’s tragic, really, that in my mind his character was renamed from cute guy to itchy jock guy. not the most ideal rebrand. he saw me, we made eye contact, and he darted to the next aisle. he couldn’t face me. i wanted him to know that i wasn’t judging him. that i too was looking to cure my itch. i considered asking him if he knew where my cream was. maybe that’s a good way to strike up a conversation with a guy "IRL.” i’d approach him with nothing but respect. “do you know where the athlete’s foot cream is?” bang, we’re in.

this CVS dance repeated itself another 15 minutes. i’d try a different aisle, run into itchy jock guy, he’s curve me, i’d smile in solidarity, wonder for a quick moment if we were meant to be, scan the aisle like i was reading a book and not registering any of the words, try again, not find it, repeat. finally an old guy caught on to my ineptitude and asked me what i was looking for. he didn’t even let me respond before he dove head first into a saga about how he got poison oak from whacking the weeds. i told him i had athlete’s foot and he scoffed at me. “obviously that’s in the foot care aisle.” the foot care aisle, how could i forget! it’s in a totally different section of the store near the tampons and pads and house cleaning supplies. i sprinted over there, i had been in CVS way too long at this point. i was starting to go crazy — no windows, no clocks in there. it’s like a casino, a damn time warp, and itchy jock guy was starting to feel like a ghost that was haunting me.

i found my cream and it cured my athlete’s foot after only a few uses. i love when that happens. when something’s been bothering you for months, you make a Google diagnosis at home, you finally get yourself to CVS to find the over-the-counter treatment, and it clears the whole thing up pretty immediately. it doesn’t need to be this all-consuming, anxiety-ridden thing. i can only hope itchy jock guy had the same experience. at the end of the day, we’re all just trying to cure our itch.