Yesterday, I went grocery shopping to pick up unsalted butter, ground beef, tortillas, sour cream, carbonated water, and peanut butter cups. It was a quick visit. When I went to the checkout lane, the bag boy (or bag man, because he looked much older than a boy) said, “Sir? I can help you at the next lane.”
It took me a second to realize that he meant me, which was great because there was no line there. So on the conveyor thingie in the next lane, I placed all of my items, and the bag man got behind the register.
He said, “Hey, handsome.”
I shot him a look, and he looked back at me, waiting, and there was a long, awkward, uncomfortable pause.
I said, “Hi,” and never thanked him. My reaction had been instinctive. To mediate the situation and quiet the awkwardness down, I began smiling and acted friendly towards him–but not too friendly. My headphones were around my neck. He started checking out my items–beep, beep–and glancing up at me, and I tried to avoid eye contact.
“What’re you listening to?” he asked.
“I uh, what?”
He gestured at my headphones.
“I, uh, don’t know.”
“Music? Podcasts?”
“Uh, yeah. That.”
The exchange went longer than I’d hoped. Through the sensor, I scanned my grocery card for a discount and dropped it to the floor out of confusion. Also, I fumbled my phone before using it to buy everything through the ATM pad. Still, he kept looking at me.
“How many bags do you need?” he asked.
“I, uh, don’t know.”
Then I saw the bag I’d brought inside. “Oh yeah. I brought this.”
When it was time to get out of there, I rolled the shopping cart towards the exit with a feeling as if I’d stolen something when I didn’t. I decided to leave the awkwardness back at the checkout lane.
At about three in the morning, I awoke with a pain on my tongue. For a week, it has been hurting. Last Saturday, when I bit down hard on it, it started bleeding, and the damn thing still hasn’t healed. All I do is aggravate it with my teeth. I can’t stop. At least to numb the pain for fifteen minutes, I use a product called Kanka in a small bottle. It’s a liquid that tastes like tree sap.
Anyway, in the middle of the night it’s at its worst. I thought about werewolves and couldn’t go back to sleep, so I visited YouTube on my MacBook. When I opened the lid, the screen appeared without a login. How strange. I would always need to use my thumbprint or password to log back in to my laptop. But this time, it bypassed that. So to see if the login would activate, I kept opening and closing the lid, but it wouldn’t. For MacBook repairs, I searched online but I didn’t get a firm answer to the problem. Instead, I let it slide and went to YouTube. Since I kept thinking about werewolves, in the search box I typed “werewolves,” and a bunch of results came up for horror movies all from the eighties, when horror was at its cheesiest, and clicked on a scene at the end of a movie. With the cameras rolling, a beauty contestant accepted her award on stage and suddenly turned into a werewolf. It horrified me. Usually, werewolves don’t scare me, but the makeup was so hideous that I couldn’t help but be disturbed. Not that she even looked like a werewolf but more of a pig person with a pink face and a sort of piggish snout. Whatever it was, it kept me awake all night. But I wasn’t as worried about pig people attacking me in bed as I was about reality. Who has room for monsters when real life is ten times the horror movie?
I stayed in bed, wide awake, until I crawled out at about seven o’clock in the morning. If I could paste the movie scene to this blog, I would, but I also don’t want to get in trouble. What if I get sued because of some lame horror movie from the eighties? I’m not sure what I’m allowed to do on here. A long time ago, I had a blog that I took down because the content was too embarrassing, and I’d posted a picture of a street sign on there. I think it was a STOP sign but I’m not sure. Anyway, the photographer who’d taken that picture sent me an email in which he asked me to delete it or else he would take legal action. Ever since then, I’ve become too cautious to post anything like that again. I just stick with my words. The world is full of werewolves.