Well, time flies when you’re being annoyed. — In The Line of Fire

Tonight, against my better judgement, I made a trip to the big shopping enterprise down the road.  Going when I’m a little stressed and a lot tired was probably not a good judgement call on my part.  What I saw there made me doubt my belief in humanity and also made me consider moving out of state so that my gene pool won’t be adulterated with these goobers.

There was the 10 or 12 year old girl who stamped her feet and cursed at her mother over a school folder.  She was quickly eclipsed by the teenage boy who was loudly whining at his mom that he wanted the chocolate chip cookie cereal for breakfast.  Not to be outdone, his mother told him that she wasn’t going to buy that, because she needed the money to buy cigarettes.

That was all as I roamed the store to get the three or four things that I needed.  Checkout was even worse.

Have you all ever seen someone who’s gauged their ears?  That’s when successively bigger implements are put into a piercing until you can put a D cell Maglight through it.  Well, the guy in the checkout lane next to mine had golf tees firmly implanted in his piercings.  His girlfriend, as big as a house and about to foal at any moment, was wearing a tank top that read, and may I be struck by lightning if I’m not telling the truth, “I have the vagina, that’s why!”*.

Of course, the experience of checking out was enhanced by that stereotype of shopping at big box stores – having three checkout lanes open when there are a couple hundred people in the store.  Seriously, I was in line reading the covers of trash magazines so long that I am now able to tell you who the British Royal Family is in bed with, what Bigfoot has been up to, who seems to have the steamiest soap opera plots, and which country and western star is leaving her husband of 25 years for Bigfoot.

All through this experience, I could feel my irritation level rising.  I don’t think I got red in the face, but the young lady who checked me out asked if I’d had a bad day.  I replied that I was fine, I just needed to get home.

Getting back to the car, I glanced at the clock, and to my surprise, I had only been in there for an hour.  Time didn’t exactly fly, but I seemed to have been caught in some kind of temporal anomaly as I descended into the madness that is a rural department store on a Wednesday night.

* I cleaned that up a tad.  I try to keep the site PG-13, and the phrasing on that shirt would have made my grandmother blush.