It's Xmas too, did you know? Well it fucking is in my local shopping centre. And on TV ads. And all over print media. The whisper's just starting to become a hiss, before it becomes a deafening roar of BUYBUYBUYBUYBUY and your already malfunctioning nervous system is once again wired into the mainframe of mass consumerism and the programming is being uploaded as we speak. 'Keep Calm And Have Another Fucking Mince Pie.' is quite a good summation of how we're all supposed to feel (on pain of death) during the 'Holiday' Season - the most ironic title for the most stressful, fucked-up period of the whole year.
So. Are you ready? Yeah, course you are. I saw you in Cash Generator trying to offload all the useless shit you got last year ready for the new landslide of shiny crap that's gonna rock your tiny world for, ooh, a good week? or perhaps even more? Wow. This year is gonna be EPIC. Anyway, I started off my fun trip by visiting a place I've never visited before...
The Temple of Affordable Clothing. YEAH.
It's exactly what it says - two floors of ethereal floating women in trances holding garments up to the light for inspection. As far as I could tell I was the only bloke. I found what I wanted very easily, though. I hardly did eight or nine circuits around the store before I stumbled across the two-foot-square rack hidden in the whole mile and a half of retail space that had what I wanted on it. So I got into the 'Queue of Eternal Fuck All' and waited. And waited. And waited. While what seemed like hundreds of black-shirted cashiers swarmed around behind a long counter like stoned worker bees.
I became beguiled by the baskets of colourful and shiny things placed at eye height to generate the optimum temptation level. In the Queue of Eternal Fuck All, there's nothing else to stare at. I looked at the row of 'team-colleague-retail-artists' (calling them 'checkout girls' is so out of touch) and wondered which one I'd be lucky enough to call my own one day. Would it be 'just been shagged in the stockroom' on till #1, or perhaps 'way too into the Twilight thing' on till #4. I noticed 'I have my own table in the staff canteen' on till #8 was giving me the eye, but since I adopted the rule of not sleeping with anyone over twice my age I did not reciprocate. When the Queue of Eternal Fuck All eventually began moving and I became eligible for parole, it was the lucky cashier #7 who provided both the service and grace that will forever earn her the title 'Vast Empty Chasm Of Joyless Futility'. I haven't come up with a way to shorten that yet.
I then used the override security code on the door of my old office nearby to gain unauthorised access and use their (rather more peaceful and hygenic) toilet facilities, before meeting a friend for lunch. The old 'walk around like you own the place and people assume you do' thing works every time, you know - even if a beanie hat and dark glasses would effectively render you unidentifiable in Court if nabbed on CCTV.
Anyway. At my own stupid suggestion, we end up in one of the only 'cafes' I could think of. Which wasn't so much a cafe as a walk-in time machine stuck on 1961 that happened to serve food. To very, very old people. By very, very, very old people. I swear, all that shit I said earlier about the Queue of Eternal Fuck All? I watched a six hundred year old woman count out a purse full of copper coins and farthings, while the seven hundred year old woman behind the till just gazed into space. She could see the fucking tunnel of light calling her, clearly, which must have been why her knuckles were white - she was gripping the till to stop getting pulled into the afterlife. I realised at that point we'd stumbled into a temporal rip in time/space. So I just ordered tea - no point hanging around, especially since it took THREE fucking goes to find a teaspoon that wasn't coated in god only knows what. Fucking EWW.
So we ended up doing the lunchtime 'pizza buffet' thing at Pizza Shed. We could have gone to the Krispy Fried Chicken place next door for some 'care in the community' service, but we all (there were three of us by this point) decided on pizza. Unlimited salad has limited fucking appeal for me, I'll be honest, but this was worth capturing:
Because nothing says 'I hate my job' quite as beautifully as a massive slab of cucumber deliberately dumped into a salad cart, clearly hacked up with a fucking samurai sword to inject just a micron of amusement into what must be, for someone anyway, the most soul-destroying waste of a life ever. It's little things like this that speak volumes about the state of the world...
...it also means I owe my darling friend lunch somewhere nice (the pizza was shit).
JH
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