Cart Attack

[Sorry for the puff piece, but I have been busy lately. I'll be getting to some juicier stuff later this month. And by 'juicier' I mean the usual stuff everyone else is too scared to say.]

Although life is surely more comfortable these days, I do sometimes wish we were still hunter-gatherers. This is because there is little more I dread than going to the supermarket, for various reasons. First, there is the fact that you have to read the label on everything if you care at all about your health; that people who don’t want to be slowly poisoned are forced to do this at all is despicable. Second, there are usually kids in the supermarket, even at 2am wtf. Third, and worst of all, there are adults in the supermarket and they like to park their fucking shopping carts in the middle of the goddamn aisle. It’s a particularly inexplicable activity when other people are around and – I don’t know – may want to get by? 

 

I’ve seen it happen so many times I feel like a baby seal bludgeoned with a baseball bat of stupidity since I cannot fathom the origin of this behavior. Why do people go down an aisle, park their cart smack-dab in the middle, walk over to an item, stop, mull the decision, and perhaps even call their spouse to confirm the purchase all the while other people are trying to eek by? Is it a (another) case of self-absorption (since it appears to be getting worse every day)? Is it the unconscious manifestation of a desire to be a fuck-face when one is not consciously going out of their way to be one? ‘Cause that’s what people who do this are, fuck-faces.

I’ve certainly been too kind when coming across these retards (pardon the insult to retarded people), usually settling for a sarcastic muttering of “That’s a good place to park” whilst rolling my eyes as I pass by. But since the day last week one guy parked his cart perpendicular to the aisle blocking all traffic, I’ve decided to retaliate. Make a problem for me and I’m going to make a problem for you. I’m going to take stuff out of their cart they want and put stuff into their cart they weren’t going to buy and see if they notice. Or, I’m going to take their cart and go park it somewhere else, like the dildo aisle. Or maybe I’ll follow them around and park in the middle of the aisle in front of them and see how they like it because, yeah, I do have time to play games.

Until people stop parking their carts in the middle of the supermarket aisle, there will never be world peace, so stop praying for it. After all, it seems to me that many of the people who think it’s a good idea to pray for world peace are the shitheads who are parking their carts in the middle of the aisle. How about y’all take your cart and park it someplace the sun don’t shine instead? The next time this shit happens, the store manager’s gonna need a clean-up in aisle four.

You're Kidding Me

I do not understand many things, among them the onus a society places upon its denizens to bear children. Actually, I take that back; from an evolutionary standpoint, demands to bear children make complete sense. But with around 7 billion people on the planet now, you’d think people would cut others some slack for not having children or not having children by the proper age as dictated by a given culture. But the nagging persists: “When are you going to get married and have kids? You do want kids, right? How many? Time’s running out!” While I can’t help people whose biological clocks are ticking – their drive towards procreation is on them at least – I wish to help people with nagging relatives and friends. How? By nagging back. (What other solution did you think I was going to propose?)

Let’s face it; it’s 2013 in America and bullying is no longer accepted. Frankly, that’s what nagging someone to have kids is these days; bullying. So no one, when asked, “When are you having kids?” should shrink like a violet. I propose fighting back in the face of such interrogations. If someone asks you, “When are you having kids?” there are any number of clever or snarky replies, such as

* Why is it important to you?

* Yeah, um, whose life is my life?

* Never, seeing how well you raised kids.

* As soon as you stop asking me about it.

* Seven billion people isn’t enough for you?

* When there is such a thing as job security again.

* When you die and need to be replaced.

* When they’re 18.

Personally, I’d reply with “Why is it important to you?” because the person you respond to with it isn’t going to have anything close to a rational answer as to why it’s important to them. I can almost hear the irrational guilt trip answer, “Because I want to have grandchildren before I die,” already. Furthermore, the person wanting to know when you’re having children is probably religious, which opens the door to educate them on why they really think you having children is important – the compulsion of genes to replicate themselves as far into the future as possible.

I have never been for the viewpoint that the pinnacle event in life is to have and raise children, because if so, one is living an arguably pointless existence once a child is born, seeing how a biological parent is not currently necessary to a child’s survival. And if the point of having and raising children becomes the point in life of the children to have and raise children? This is descending into idiocy from a thinking standpoint. (Though, I guess we can’t expect a biologically based drive to be subject to reason.) Besides, after the childbearing years doesn’t a person become useless if having children is all there is to life? Maybe not; I guess someone’s gotta put a dollar in the birthday card.

Yes, families are great and we all love one another and our respective children, but no one should be made to feel they are less of a human being because they haven’t done their procreation duty. Coercion, guilt, shaming – we don’t do these things anymore in freedom-loving Western industrialized countries. That is so last century and two billion people ago. And that’s why I don’t have kids, ‘cause I’m a modern man who loves freedom and free is the last thing you are when you have kids.

[To be more exact, I don’t have children because I think of them mostly as demanding, noisy, germ-infested, stress-inducing, sleep-deprivation machines that never stop when you want them to. Besides, my cats are a pain in the ass and they’re only half the size of a baby. Why the hell would I double my trouble? And no, it wouldn’t be better just because they’re mine. I know me and I sure as hell wouldn’t want to raise even a half of me.]