Please note that all blog posts before 8 April 2007 were automatically imported from LiveJournal. To see the comments and any LiveJournal-specific extras such as polls and user icons, please find the source posting at http://brianenigma.livejournal.com/2002/03/I am becoming more and more afraid of going to the local Ralphs. I may just have to eat take-out or starve. First, there is the bag…boy…girl…thing. Picture somebody who looks like the scary online Peter Pan only older, more creechy looking, and very leathery and sunken. She used to appear at Diedrichs wearing androgynous and womanly clothing…while studying black magic, Crowley, sex magic, and generally being a little too evil and creepy for my tastes. I do not know if she is still doing the cross-gender thing because the Ralphs bagger uniforms are unisex, consisting of pants, a shirt, and a vest. Anyway, Bree just kind of spooks me in the same way a child molester or rapist would. I am not against her lifestyle choice, but there seems to be something fundamentally creepy and evil in the execution of said lifestyle. The sympathetic looks and eye contact I get from the various checkers at Ralphs (and the lack of eye contact or acknowledgment they give Bree) kind of confirms that she also freaks out the cow-orkers.
Speaking of bag girls…or bag ladies, rather. There is this dirty, wrinkly old lady with matted salt-n-peppa–or rather, salt and pepper–hair in a puffy blue jacket always around 17th street…Diedrich’s, Tummy Stuffer, Ralphs, etc. Presumably, she is homeless, or jobless or something. Most of the time she is sitting at this little plastic park-bench-type thing in front of Ralphs. Every once in a while she asks me for money, and I am glad that I usually have no cash, using my bank card for everything, as my conscience would want to give her whatever cash I had. Anyway, the other night she followed me into and then throughout Ralphs. I felt a little guilty as she watched me heft the 8-pack of Guinness into my basket (which, by the way, was 50 cents more than the 30-pack of Budweiser). I felt a little iky as I hefted the 1.5L jug-o-Beringer Merlot into my basket. Likewise with the pasta, sauce, cheese, crackers, and veggies. It was just kind of creepy having a homeless-type person follow me around the store as I selected food and drink to purchase. She never really said anything, but really was not very discreet in following me around.
Can’t the local Ralphs have GOOD creepy things–like midgets who dance and talk backward…or terrorists wielding big spherical black bombs, like in the cartoons…or dolls that scream eternally in lawyer-speak when you pull their strings…or Hare Krishnas out in front, complete with the hair and flowers…little girls in the canned goods aisle that scream and spew forth pea soup as their heads rotate like sprinklers….a “biker gang” of old and/or obese people on those electrically operated sit-in cart things with the shopping basket attached to the front…space/time vortices that lead to other worlds…scruffy teenagers doing whippets in the dairy section…
