Regular Saturday Night

Dear Diary,

I apologize for being slow to write to you this year, it’s just with all the ass-kicking and heart-breaking, I have been one busy girl! I did have the most peculiar weekend. I would say it was a full moon but it was not, nor a blue moon or an eclipse moon. Just a regular ol’ weekend but the crazies were in full force. I guess I should back up and explain to you exactly what happened.

So the happenings began on Saturday night. I attended an evening showing with a couple girl friends. I was in desperate need of food for my puppy. Poor little piglet had eaten only a portion of what she usually eats the past few days. Of course the pet stores were closed by the time the movie let out, so I stopped into Rite Aid on my way home. Since most people have much more going on on a Saturday night than shopping at the drug store, I was literally the only person in the store with the exception of the lone employee of the evening. I was also the only car in a very large parking lot. So I find the skimpy selection of dog food and laugh when the largest bag they sell is 8 pounds. My piglet eats 8 pounds a day! (If she were a child and not a dog, I’d put her in commercials with her slim and muscular physique and ability to gorge food. I would make a million! ….Sorry diary, I got sidetracked)

At any rate, I select a small bag of food and trot through the barren store to the checkout. As I’m punching in my pin of my debit card thinking about what pajamas I will be putting on when I get home, the cashier interrupts my highly developed train of thought to ask if I had received an H1N1 shot? To which I replied, “no…” I suspect he’s going to try to sell me on the next clinic but am oddly surprised when he says, “Did you know there is new research now that shows the H1N1 shots are harmful…they cause DNA damage!” “Well I am not planning to get one anyway so …” Now before I complete the “conversation” I must describe said cashier to you. He is fairly tall, long shaggy hair, some ungroomed facial hair, and best of all beety weird eyes. His gaze actually reminded me a little of the hitch hiker Ben Stiller’s character picks up in There’s Something About Mary. Now if you recall, that guy was a weeeeirdo. So I am now done punching in my pin number because let’s face it, four digits doesn’t take long. And the cashier isn’t pushing his button so I can go home to put on those cozy pink fleece pajamas, rather he’s elaborating on the harmful effects of the H1N1 shot, “You don’t even want to know what it is doing to pregnant women.” As he stares at my stomach. My not basketball shaped stomach. Finally he turns to the register to punch in whatever he needs to punch so I can leave the bloody Rite Aid. But not before he can add in one final word, and that is “You should really do some research about it. Because they tell you it is good for you but it is not. They want people to get the shots but they’re really messing people up.” “Okay then, well like I said not planning to get one so I guess I lucked out! BYE!”

As I briskly walk out to my lone car in the parking lot, another foolish person in desperate need of something that can not wait until normal stores are open pulls into the lot. I can’t help but think I should stop them before they walk into the danger zone and come out with damaged DNA and distorted babies, but then I think better of it because those fleece pajamas were calling my name!