This is based off of a poem I wrote before. Somebody said it sounded more like a short story than a poem, and I agreed. So here it is in story form.

I was standing in the "12 Items or Less" lane at the grocery store the other day, steaming mad at the guy in front of me. Clearly he had fourteen items, trying to pass them of as twelve. I slowly began plotting ways that I could have him killed, but things got too complicated (Where would I ever find plutonium?), so I decided to try and occupy myself with something else.

I began looking at the different types of gum to see if there wasn't a brand I hadn't tried yet. Deciding that there wasn't, I took a glance around. Bored people standing in lines staring at bored people working the registers staring at the boring items that the boring people picked out with utter... boredom. Another day in paradise as usual.

I glanced behind me, and I caught a sight that I won't soon forget. A dumpy looking woman, overweight by maybe sixty pounds, stringy hair, pointy nose, large bloodshot eyes with puffy bags underneath them. She was wearing green sweat pants and a green sweat shirt. She looked like a watermelon that had been horribly disfigured in a freak farming accident. Attached to her hips was a pink fanny pack that stood out like gay man at a tractor pull (For lack of better similes).

The woman stared with a dumpy and longing expression at the magazine rack at the end of the lane. It contained different pieces of literature, mostly about which celebrity is dating which other celebrity, or which celebrity went through a traumatic crisis in their life and came out a better person because of it, or which celebrity lost thirty pounds on the latest and greatest new diet ("The Oatmeal Diet").

But she wasn't staring at any of those magazines. She was more interested in the trash and fluff magazines closer to the bottom. The one's about aliens and bat babies and Hitler. The one's about bigfoot and Satan and Elvis. The one's that claim to have the truth about JFK (He's alive and well and living in a compound with Jimmy Hoffa and John Lennon, who of course faked his death just to get out of the limelight). The one's that any normal person would find funny and amusing, but still fluff.

The look in her eyes said that she wanted one. The flickering glance she gave about here said that she was afraid of how the people around her would think of her if she did.

I honestly wanted to grab her and assure that nobody would give a flipping fuck, and that if anybody did think anything about it, they'd forget about it by the time they got home. Most people like to pry their noses into other people's business, but only for a limited amount of time, because for the most part they are more worried about themselves than they are of anybody else.

And so what if you read a fluff magazine? That doesn't make you abnormal, not that normal means a goddamn thing. There is no set precedent for normal. Normal changes when society changes, because we live in an ever-growing, ever-changing world. And different people have different opinions, so normal varies from person to person.

Who gives a fuck if you are normal or not? Not being well-balanced doesn't mean you're a wart on society, it's just means you are you! And there's absolutely nothing wrong with being you, because it's the best person you could be (Unless you're a pedophile or jerk off or Republican or whatever, in which case you should probably go ahead and try to change your behavior to fit other people's expectations).

These are the things I wanted to say to her. I almost did too, but at the last minute decided it was my place to tell her how to live her life. She'd have to make up her own goddamned mind, because that's the only way we grow stronger. We have to learn the hard way. Tough love, as they say.

The guy in front of me, now with the fifteen items (I caught him grabbing a candy bar and tossing it onto the rest of his crap), was almost finished, so I began to move forward so I could by my cream cheese and cigarettes.

And as I walked up to the counter, smiling at the cashier (A pretty young girl who I was sure would fall in love with me if I just smiled at her... which she didn't), I took one last look at the woman in the green sweats with the sad eyes and the pink fanny pack. I turned back to the cashier and started to hand her my money. The only thing I could think of was:

"Is it really that fucking hard to carry a purse?"

Another day in paradise.