Culture vulture

Scenes from a nosy parker
Mystery is all around us. One has only to venture forth into the public parking lots to be confronted by, if not the inexplicable, the undecipherable.

Why, oh why, for instance, do people turning off Mangrove into the S&S Produce parking area so often stop in the driveway waiting to claim a place that someone else is just preparing to leave instead of proceeding to the next available empty space? More than once while trying to access this marvelous store I have been forced to block traffic on Mangrove while someone blocks the entrance to the parking lot while trying to save themselves from walking the extra 10 yards they would have had to cover if they chose to simply move on to the next empty spot.

One would think that health-food shoppers wouldn’t mind walking a little bit; walking is, after all, a healthful activity, while idling one’s car in a blocked traffic lane is not. We’re all aware of that fact and yet the compulsion to park closer negates all reason in a fairly large portion of the parking and shopping public. A physical anthropologist could probably make a case that our primitive instincts, derived from millions of years of hunting and gathering, override our ability to make rational and/or compassionate decisions when it comes to obtaining readily available food, but really, at this point in our evolution as self-aware, decision-making creatures, aren’t we capable of consciously overriding our internal genetic programming and deciding, “Rather than sitting here blocking traffic and creating a hazard for others, I’m going to move ahead to the next available parking spot"? Apparently not, based on evidence gathered over the past weekend.

More weirdness in store
Picture this: You are inside a shopping emporium the ceiling of which is so vast and far above as to be interpreted by your sensory apparatus as more akin to the sky than an artificially constructed barrier between you and same. On either side of you immense racks of shelving weighted with enough merchandise to supply a small city tower loomingly into the stratosphere. All around you throngs of your fellow shoppers maneuver carts twice the size of those at your local grocery store, weaving down the aisles in a complex, unchoreographed dance of consumption. Then, as you pause to get your bearings at the end of an aisle, you see a young mother forging through the multitude with two small boys, ages about 5 and 3, sitting on the spacious bottom of her cart as though in a small room playing nonchalantly with the merchandise. The older of the two picks up a green glass bottle of red wine and addresses his younger sibling in a breathy, sort of artificially hoarse voice. “Hey, baby, you want some wine?” he stage-whispers. “Hey, baby, you want a little wine?”

One can only speculate on the source material the young thespian was drawing on for inspiration in creating this scene, but one thing’s for sure: He was damn good and funny as hell at portraying the wheedling Lothario.