An Excursion

I hate shopping. No, let me clarify. It's not the actual act of picking something up and paying for it that gets me. I can deal with it if I absolutely must (e.g. if my last pair of socks has disintegrated to the point where more of it's material can be found in the lint trap of my super-anaesthomagneto-ionic-ozonizer-hepaxtreme air filter than on my feet). What really kills me is having to walk through the mall past all the ridiculous glamour shops for 9 year old girls, wandering through a department store past rows of women's lingerie with no end in sight and then, once I have found my department, spending fifteen minutes wandering back through the women's lingerie (in case I missed any important evidence before) to find a register manned by a chain-smoking 50 year old woman talking on the cell phone to her daughter about silica gel. Then, count in the fact that I then have to find my car (which caused me to scream "This is the Owl Lot! Where's the fucking raccoon lot???" and scare a couple of children), return a bizarre pair of polystyrene-cross-training-pump-action bunny slippers that someone in my family had inexplicably bought at "Journey's", fight horrible traffic through a Dantean maze of parking lots and roads to get home and discover that in my panic I accidentally bought tube socks (I have not the words). So, it's not the core act of shopping that bothers me, it's the significant amount of peripheral irritation that tends to give me the fear. I'm not the tight-fisted Scrooge that people seem to think I am. I don't have a problem SPENDING money, I just tend to go need a goodly amount of sedatives in order to calmly get to a place where I can. And then, after the little gnome who lives in my spinal chord was just about to sever my final nerve, the neighbor's chicken-mutt starts barking/squawking at me, causing me to go into minor cardiac arrest. Yes, something must be done about that dog... But now is not the time. I must patiently pack my socks and wait until the moment is right...