The strange twilight of a store just before closing

Well, I got what I wanted: today my boss approached me about a promotion. Anyway, I didn’t get it because I’m quitting in a month.

I was at the downtown S-market just before it closed tonight. It was weird. One guy started piling up Valio’s pre-sliced red label Emmental cheese packages as I walked by. He stared at me as I walked by and just kept on piling the packages. He took every last one.

Was he a store worker?

I dunno. He wasn’t wearing work clothes and he didn’t look like a store worker. He was in his thirties, and big—not as in fat, but, you know, beefy. Like Finnish guys get.

Yeah. Weird.

And then there was this other guy, at the cashier, in line after me. He had two huge packages of hard-tack and four huge plastic bags of tomatos. Each bag must have had at least, uh, a dozen-and-a-half tomatos.

Wow.

Yeah. I asked him if the tomatos were a good price in this store or was he, like, going on a trip. He said he was hungry. And the way he said it: no sense of humor, no smile or grin on nothing.

Huh. Weird.

Yeah.

Here are some articles begging to be written:

  • “Why No-one Would Ever Read a Magazine I’d Found, or I Like Pseudo-Intellectual Crap”

  • “You Never Saw the Legion of Immigrants and Have-nots That Cleaned Loveboat, or There’s a reason there’s no such expression as ‘clean as a cruise ship’”

  • “How New Age Wisdom and Relativist Philosophy Made Me Boring and Bitter”

---