by CB Parrish
If I don’t grocery shop, I get thinner. If I grocery shop within my means, I get fatter, and unhealthier. We are being poisoned to death.
If I brave the conquered hordes to find a new vacuum cleaner, I end up making a bad decision in my avidity to remove myself from their proximity.
If I resolve to purchase instead of food a new pot to marry my reviving orchids as their getting well present, there will not be one the right size in the entire warehouse, and I will have hurt myself making certain.
If I speak to a stock clerk, I will end up reviling the fates aloud and whining for a People’s Store, where owners, employees and shoppers are all happy, all the time, shaking my fist at the nearest camera and purposefully exercising my innate dottiness to confound the traffic tracking software into a smoking ruin at corporate HQ.
If I grab a new item of clothing, men will look at me harder for a day or two, and I will feel as though there is a perfectly doable future in store for me for at least an hour.
If I forego that treat often enough, there might be ahead of me a longer span of time where I feel that doable future… and it might well even stretch into veritable years of doability… depending on prevailing solar flares.
If I actually remember to get out the money to pay for my purchase at the register, without being prompted, I will forget to actually leave with my purchase.
If I make a shopping list, I will forget it, and if I don’t forget it, I will forget to look at it while shopping.
If I go shopping, I cannot stop wailing about not listening to my mother on the matter of all those rich men who wanted to marry me when I was a babe… even if in the deepest recesses of my abject honesty I still have to admit that I still wouldn’t marry him for his money.
If I go shopping, Che Guevara will cross my mind.
If I have to make a large purchase, my anxiety will not ebb, ever, if I do not make a ridiculously ill-advised purchase to spite it, and actually dwell on the ghost of Che Guevara for a few days.
Sometimes — honestly, sometimes — I don’t share all this with my fellow shoppers as it’s going through my mind. Sometimes I just think to myself, rolling down the toothpaste and Ensure aisle, that I still have not gotten that special t-shirt reserved for trips out into the world printed with “WEALTHY SOCIALIST GENTLEMAN WANTED” to save me worrying that he just walked by me, completely unaware that I’m the woman of his dreams… after, anyway, only a little of his money has gone toward buffing me back up a comparatively tiny bit….
I try hard not to hold a store clerk’s dirt stupidity or utter humorlessness against her, and very sexistly try to pick a male, when possible, not because he might be any less dirt stupid and/or humorless, but because he is so much less likely to take it out on me. I also try to pick really young ones in my bodhisattva effort to say something that will make them hesitate to grow into cads. It is, after all, these glancing encounters with total strangers that add up to something in those very busy shutting their ears to their parents. But anyone, really, can use that utterance from left field that breaks the circuit in their circular thinking, or punches nostril holes in that plastic death zip-locked around their head. Small talk can liberate the left-for-dead all around one.
Don’t be a mute shopper. It’s a damn waste of money.
Shopping is not just for getting stuff. It is for doing one’s best by everyone… as is every other minute of life.