I know you all want to laugh, but.....
I’m afraid.
...that we don’t always get what we want.
So there.
Sorry, I’m a little off my game lately. You’ll have to excuse me.
Living in the moment is my game. Where the Day Takes Me and such, you know how it is.
So I can’t remember exactly what got the idea in my head, but i overheard rumblings of a ‘need to be prepared’. Something beyond my usual trips for weekend supplies on a Friday night.
So.
Target.
After 5 minutes I’m already asking myself why the fuck I’m here. Some paper products, some extra crunchy potato chips (of course), some frozen pizza and snacks for the kid, and then I’m searching for just a reasonable amount of emergency supplies.
(Just in case.)
I just wanted my fair share—not trying to make waves—but it’s not in the cards.
The Local Concerned Citizens Facebook Group post assured me that the stores were replenishing the necessary supplies, but alas!
Here comes Doomsday Prepper Boy with his cart full of masks and a six months supply of cleaning supplies leaving in his wake a desolation that leaves me all indignant and kind of pissed off.
Because I can’t really ward off all this fear with my potato chips.
(Objectively anyway.....)
Fuck.
Pull out my phone all ready to fire off a ‘Thanks for the slamming advice to come to Hell/Target for no reason’ post on the FB Group That Will Not Be Named, when I see the new leading post on the page showing a list of ‘Ideas of How to Keep Your Kids Engaged and Learning While At Home’. This sits atop a photo of some vaguely familiar mom making artisanal bread or something with her smiling kids in their well appointed kitchen.
My kids are engaged in getting really fucking good at Minecraft at the moment, thank you very much!
So there.
I don’t have time for this....
My righteous anger at Doomsday Prepper Boy isn’t great enough to have me actually call him out, obviously, so I sigh passive-aggressively as I walk by him to get to my car and head to the old job site...
I drive the familiar route quickly, a rare sense of urgency surging through me as I get out of the car in the dark and fumble for my keys to the Halloween store where I worked until recently. ( In theory I was supposed to give the keys back to management, but things were a little loosey goosey at the end given the situation we find ourselves in, so.....)
I blew past the cheesy vampire, zombie, and serial killer crap costumes taking up space near the front and went for the good stuff tucked away near the back for our more discerning customers. After a few minutes I found what I was looking for.
**********************************************
“Dad, how much longer do we have to do this?’
We’ve been videotaping for about 20 minutes and I keep telling my kids that we’re just one take away from ‘getting it right’, and that it’s “going to be awesome”, and it is.
Just like the video footage of us at Target walking the aisles in own our (cheap) commedia masks was awesome. Sure, Prepper Man was nowhere to be seen, but at least the other hoarders saw us in our defiance as they clutched at their cheap-o, standard issue, single use disposables.
I take the hastily produced home video along with the footage from Target and post it on the Concerned Citizens Facebook Group, right under another post about upcoming distant learning best practices.
‘After getting some necessary supplies, The kids and I rehearsing our modern commedia style adaptation of an Albert Camus classic.....Up next tomorrow: artisanal bread!’
So there.
©2020 by David Leicht. All rights reserved.