I am afflicted with a deadly illness that has ruined my life. It's called Walking At A Normal Fucking Speed and cripples my ability to function in society.
I claim to minimise my time in public spaces because of loud noise, overstimulation, overheating, and health concerns. Truthfully it's because me getting stuck behind a three-child pram for more than a microsecond results in authoritarian thoughts of cubing everyone who stands in my way.
People who sprint across the road just to screech to a halt in front of me and stare at their phone deserve nothing more than forced labour camps. Able-bodied people who move at the pace of tectonic plates shall be given exoskeletons that I remotely control to forcibly speed them up on footpaths.
(This is all far funnier when you consider I'm 5ft 6" and my left leg is two inches shorter than my right)
Supermarkets are the worst for all of these combined. Why I haven't moved to online deliveries and click-and-collect ranges from excuses such as "I want an excuse to drive Takumi" to "Tesco gave me the wrong type of tomato and now I'm considering domestic terrorism."
Dunnes is hell on earth. It has everything in stock, meaning the large food shops are done here, meaning the bills are often €200+, then the arguing over vouchers is excruciating. Dante Alighieri did not envision a middle-aged mother forcing the entire queue to shuffle out of her way three separate times for her to stare at chocolate bars to push her bill up to a certain amount such that her vouchers covered more, only to realise she miscalculated the amounts, proceeding to argue with the cashier over price labels, then finding half her vouchers were different to what she thought, THEN loading her shopping into the trolley for the subsequent five minutes. But if he did, Inferno would have ten circles.
SuperValu is a nursing home. I am not attuned to John-and-Mary culture at the best of times, but visiting here could be a documentary. Also the car park is a war zone fought by tortoises.
Tesco operates one human-staffed till, and five morbillion self-checkouts visited entirely by cataconic dudebros. Also I refuse on principle to get a Clubcard to get the actual prices.
Aldi and moreso Lidl should be more to my taste. I meet the cashier's eye, they challenge me to a duel, then proceed to sling my shopping at lightning speeds through the register while I make a mediocre attempt to keep up. A brief sniff of victory is all they display. Which is great fun, but neither of them have good fish. Or vegetables. Or snacks. Or spices.
And here rests my problem. I desire a supermarket designed from scratch for people who know what they're getting, get the thing, pay for the thing, then evaporate into mist. With aisles curated for the actual separation of food types, not forcing the essential stuff into alternating corners of the warehouse. Alas no overpaid executive sees my vision.
In completely unrelated news, I scored full marks on an autism assessment for the first time in that psychiatrist's career. Please clap.