peeny wally

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November 19, 2003

I Can No Longer Shop Happily

What the fuck is wrong with people in Texas? What on earth makes them think they have the privilege to approach any other person in this city and say whatever pops into their damn fool minds? Where are their damn manners? Sometimes I think everyone around me was raised by a pack of wolves. I’ve been cornered and asked some idiotic and infuriating things before as I walked to the bus stop or some such, just minding my own. But what I saw today took the whole damned cake.

I’ve just returned from the Fiesta Mart. Today is my free day and I’m going to try and make a Oaxacan-style red mole (hooray!). I needed a few things from the store and the trip was mostly painless, until the checkout line. As I was standing in line, in the next aisle over were two young women, probably 20 or 22 years old, heads covered, trying to get through the line as effortlessly as possible, all the while trying to hush a screaming two-year old boy, organize groceries and avoid a thousand swerving carts. I watched, stunned, as a man a couple of lines over shoved his way through the crowded registers and approached these two women. “Are you Shiite or Sunni?” he asked, apropos of fucking nothing. No hello. No acknowledgement that they were even fellow humans. Just like that. There was a long and weighty silence, and I grew afraid.

“Um, why?” the bolder woman asked.
“I’m just curious. Which are you?”
“We are Sunni,” the woman answered back, tough as nails.
She didn’t look surprised at all. She looked weary. And I was furious and embarrassed and disgusted.

The man then proceeded to scramble his way back to his own line and talk to the man next to him, spouting off some stuff and nonsense about how Sunni Muslims are superior to Shiites, but still terrible people, how all they do all the livelong day is degrade women and look down on the African-American male and generally be just plain bad. He was saying all of this so loudly!

He then went on to say, “Me, I’m a Christian! I believe in Jesus! Look at my crucifix!” (as though you could miss the fucking giant, shiny gold-plated thing hanging from his neck.)

I just wanted to scream about all the ugly things done to women and black men by so-called Christians, and all the ugly things done to all sorts of people all over the world in that name and defy him to show where in the fuck in the Koran it commands to live out any of the ugly things done it its name and also just ask what the hell was wrong with him, that he thought he had the right to approach two total strangers, make assumptions about, judge and denounce them and ruin my fucking good mood all in the time it took me to get through the grocery line.

Instead I meekly paid for my papaya and chiles and came home and furiously smoked. And scowled. And grew sadder.

Posted by pogo at November 19, 2003 3:31 PM