A cracked polystyrene man who just crumbles and burns

I love that my beard makes me scary.

I have Data in the trolley, in the local supermarket. The Christmas spirit is alive and kicking, kicking out at anyone who moves slowly, anyone not in a panic state of ‘must consume, must consume’. It’s busy, it’s frenzied. And look who’s coming...

It’s some balding, suited cunt who I feel deep in my bones was born on the same day as me, in the same year, perhaps at the very same second, who is rushing through the supermarket trying to get to the comically embedded off-licence section. He is hassled, he is harried, but he is a king of the world in his mind. He has bottles of wine to buy for colleagues who have unexpectedly bought him bottles of wine.
Yes, prick, I thought everyone hated you too.

We find ourselves, this king of crap and I, me and this monarch of the mediocre, in something of a Robin Hood/Litttle John type scenario. Yes, it is the height of the holiday season and yes, the schools have just ejected the children but still they stock the shelves. More, more produce thrown upon the bonfire of our innoncence, more stuff-rope with which to hang our sense of perspective, our very morality.

So with space for just the one of us to move down the aisle, we lock eyes. My instinct in these situations is to gesture expansively and allow the lady or indeed the rare supermarket shopping gentleman through. And if they don’t smile and say thank you then I shriek ‘You’re welcome!’ because I am a cunt.

But I know this guy and I want to move to the being a cunt thing that little bit earlier because yes, I know him but more because he thinks knows me as I’m in my deadbeat dad uniform and I’m pushing a toddler around and I’m doing grocery shopping and this fuck thinks that he is better than me and prebeard I might have agreed with him and dropped my gaze but not today, not with my facebadger, I hold the stare and he suddenly he looks genuinely terrified and waves me through.

‘No.’ I say. ‘No. After you.’ And I smile. But my smile is bearded and dead, a rotting stinking corpse of a smile and he knows it and he edges past me mumbling ‘Thank you’.

‘You’re welcome,’ I hiss.

It’s Christmas trying to fuck me folks. But I will not be fucked.