Wednesday, September 27, 2023

Too Much Trauma

Things have gotten to the point where going to the grocery store is a really traumatic experience for me. It gets me all riled up.

It’s pretty much the same as how taking my nightly shit used to get me all riled up. My last official act of every day is to sit on the bowl. This is what the new agey, self-care types would refer to as my “me” time. Except the problem was that I would also use this time to read a little before bed. And I read a bunch of lefty political magazines and I’d go to bed grumbling about how the fascists are taking over and everything was going to hell. And I couldn’t sleep so my wife decided that I needed to read something that was full of nothing but good news so she subscribed me to a magazine that was all about beer. And when I read my beer magazine, I’d come to bed in a much better mood. I guess I was soothed and reassured by being reminded that even if the fascists are taking over and everything is going to hell, at least we still live in a world where there’s a wide variety of beer.

But what gets me all riled up when I go to the grocery store are those people who park their cars in the striped area next to the cripple parking spaces. That’s even more ignorant than parking in the cripple spaces themselves because those striped areas are there because wheelchair cripples like me need extra room next to the parking space so we can deploy our ramp or lift so we can get out of the vehicle. So what happens is we park and go inside the store and when we come back out we see that someone has parked in the striped area, which means we don’t have room to get back into the vehicle. When this happens to me, I say to myself, “Didn’t that jackass see all those stripes painted on the ground? If not, they’re too blind to be driving!”

And didn’t they take a minute to consider that those stripes might mean something? They’re the same stripes that are painted in the fire lane and everybody knows that it means that you don’t park there or you’ll get towed. But you won’t get towed if you park in the striped area next to the cripple parking space.  If I complain to the manager that someone is parked in the striped area next to the cripple space, they’ll just shrug and mumble a generic apology. They don’t want to tow anybody for that reason because they don’t want to piss off customers. Apparently, they don’t mind if they piss off customers like me.

One time the vehicle parked in the stripes next to the cripple space I was parked in was a tow truck. Who do you call when you need to have a tow truck towed?

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