...and I am going to love it even if it kills me! Really now, I need to go to Costco and that can raise my BP enough to make my head burst so maybe I should take some extra BP meds before I go there. It promises to be a madhouse today based on my past experiences but I need to get some supplies that were forgotten. Then I need to get at least a couple more presents today.
Tomorrow, Christmas Eve, I will do likewise. I have gone Christmas shopping on Christmas Eve every year since I was about 10 - 12 years old. I am virtually certain I have done so without fail although I suppose it possible, though not probable, that I might have missed once or twice and forgotten about it. Anyway, I will be going shopping again tomorrow. It is my tradition and I love doing it although I cannot say I always love dealing with some of the arsehats out and about on Christmas Eve. If you go shopping on Christmas Eve, you like me can wind up running into any of the multitude of arsehats that seem to abound during the last minutes of the Christmas shopping season.
On Christmas, when I was in my late twenties or early thirties, I had the sinking feeling that someone was following me. I stopped by a store and pulled an old movie trick that the director probably learned from a cop. I used a store window as a mirror and after a few stores where I was able to repeat that, I realized two guys were indeed following me. They looked like Puerto Rican (most prevalent group f Hispanics in NYC at that time) junkies. I even saw they peering into a store I had entered to look at jewelry. I made it look as if I was going into another store and came out of its recessed store front at full speed and one of them almost walked into me as he approached. He was frazzled after that; yet, him but he and his accomplice persisted in following me store to store and I went in and out of many. I walked into another recessed storefront and made sure my pistol was ready in the holster with my coat out of the way so it was showing. The guy just about ran up to the store front to try to get a glimpse of what I was buying or maybe if I paid with cash. He was shocked to see me standing there, and saw what was on my hip. I did not see him or his pal after that.
Other times dealing with Christmas Eve arsehats has been much more benign but maybe more annoying. I have had to fight off a woman trying to grab an item I was buying right out of my hands. She said something stupid like she saw it first but she was nowhere in sight when I found it on the shelf, to the pushers and bumpers who think of you as an impediment to move out of their way, to the jerks who don't know how to or refuse to hold a door for you, to those who seem incapable of saying thank you if you hold the door for them or show them some common courtesy, to the morons cutting you off in the parking lot or on the road so they can get there before you or before all the deals are gone, to the drunken Santas demanding you drop a donation in the kettle to the protesting atheists who show up at shopping centers to try to make you and others miserable. Yes, I go regardless and I will love having gone even if it kills me.
And now I had better get going before there are too many of them out and about.
Merry Christmas to all of them in advance because shortly I may not feel like saying it to them at all.
All the best,
Glenn B
