She found herself throwing a temper tantrum as she left the store. God insisted she take an unusual exit: the one near the Meals2Go counter (and dine-in facility in the grocery store, which, might we add, never has more than two people inside of it, so is a waste of space. Have a bigger deli, yo.) The power doors only opened by themselves when you push the disabled button on the wall, which she refused to do because she’s not disabled.
Thus, she ended up pushing open one of the doors (for it’s a double-door entry to keep from losing all the refrigeration inside. Let’s be honest, there’s so much refrigeration they might as well let the store get to 40F and make everyone dress for the weather appropriately…) and struggled with one of the doors. She could have sworn the door would stay open all the way if she just opened it 3/4 of the way. She was wrong; you had to open it all the way so that the door would stay open of its own accord. No matter; she got through with a little fuss without using the door’s disability feature, which, if you ask her, is better anyway. She’s not disabled. Not anymore, anyway.
It was her birthday, you know, so she was in the store buying vegetables to roast altogether and some Swerve to make a vanilla cake with. When she got home, she discovered she still had some brown sugar Swerve, but shrugged, figuring she’d eventually eat the shit. Maybe. Or feed it to her trolls.
As soon as she exited the building, one of her nagging boy children that will not leave her alone started to throw a fit. He wanted her to look disgruntled for many reasons, most specifically to drive away a potential love interest by being a real crab cake. I mean, crab. (Why is it we call someone being more than irritable by the name of a species that defends its every boundary with finesse and finality? The crab has done nothing wrong to earn this kind of hatred, you guys.)
“I’m never coming back here to shop again,” he declared through her very mouth. She had become used to this kind of bull shit by now, sadly, and just said nothing. “I’m going to get curbside pickup from now on!” Sure you are, Nicky Boy. We’re totes doing curbside pickup. After Nick had his temper tantrum regarding this entire thing, she started to hear the deli folk talk about how stupid she is for going out the “wrong door.”
“What a ditz!” one of them remarked. “Who?” another asked innocently. It was none other than Sir Deli Man asking, of course. “That stupid blonde who comes through here with the anime hair never buying anything, that’s who,” replied Steve. For, inevitably, there’s always a Steve talking shit about somebody. Sir Deli Man took offense to this, being that he was soft on that girl (or was she a woman? It’s hard to tell these days, isn’t it?) As Joe was formulating his reply, another deli man spoke up… one of the sushi guys.
“Dude, you can’t judge a book by its cover. Your real problem is she’s beautiful and you think she’s going to be mean to you if you talk to her. I overheard Dave say she’s a real sweetheart just a few days ago, so I don’t think it’s right to be judging her over something like that. Besides, what if she’s into that NLP thing? Neuro-something programming. I heard all about it from my wife. And, you don’t get ultra babe and sweetheart in the same package nearly never, so whatchu bitchin’ about if she’s a little wonky?” The sushi man stared at Steve, daring him to open his stupid mouth again.
“I don’t want to hear you guys talking bad about customers anymore,” Joe (aka Sir Deli Man) spoke up after it was clear Steve had been silenced. Damien smiled at Joe, appreciating his back up on defending the poor white woman who just left in what seemed the most complicated manner possible, dragging a tiny little cart through double doors that were not automatic. Damien was very happy with his wife and will do anything to keep her, but if that girl was as sweet as Dave said, it was a miracle and he’d have considered her himself if he was single.
“What, are you saying you got the hots for her, Joe? You ain’t never defended a customer from us before,” Andrew piped up suddenly, backing his buddy Steve.
“I’m saying I’m tired of you gossiping about people you don’t know. I might’ve fallen for it or let it slide before, but I’m not going to do that anymore because it’s wrong and you’ve finally met my threshold for pure bullshit. I happen to know for a fact that lady is going through something that none of us understand because she told Dave she can barely eat food when he wanted to help her find something. Do you really want to invite the devil in by gossiping about a woman who can barely eat?” Joe replied.
Serendipitously, Dave showed up just then. He was a wandering gypsy sort in the deli, flitting between stations when he wasn’t very busy and asking if he can do extra work once in a great while. “What are you guys talking about?” he asked mildly, having only heard the “barely eat” part of what Joe just said.
“That woman you talked to a few days ago just left through the Meals2Go door with a cart and these assholes are calling her stupid for not using the disability button to open the door for her,” Joe replied matter-of-factly.
“She’s not disabled… why should she use the disability button?” Dave asked innocently. “So she was back… you know, I see her almost every day I’m on shift,” he said, sticking to the facts instead of gossiping like the rest. “Funny thing, that, if she can’t hardly eat, don’t you think?”
Joe was silent for a while. The other monkies around him were chittering away about the next thing on the agenda for the day. “Yeah, she’s in here almost every day. She goes to produce first and then walks through here usually from what I’ve observed,” Joe told Dave as he continued on with his tasks.
“So she can eat vegetables. I guess that’s a double-edged sword… vegetables aren’t all that great, are they?” Dave asked as he automatically set to helping Joe with his task.
“I think it depends on the vegetable and the preparation. You know, we don’t have a whole lot of vegetables in this area, but we do have three options. She never buys them that I’ve seen… you ever see her buy them?” Joe asked curiously.
“Nope. She was eyeing rotisserie chicken, plain, when I talked to her. I thought she was going to check the ingredients label for a minute there… maybe she was and I disturbed her. She could be shy… she kind of took a shortcut when she replied to me, which has never happened to me before… she answered the questions I wanted to ask, not the question I asked. Don’t you think it’s a bit strange?” Dave and Joe had nearly knocked out his entire task ten minutes earlier than scheduled, allowing them to move on to the next task. At this rate, Joe would have an extra idle hour overall. Dave really was helpful like that.
Joe gave Dave a sidelong glance now that they were between tasks. “I don’t know what to think about her answering what you really wanted to know instead of what you asked. I’d want to know if that was a consistent thing she does or a one-off. Maybe you scared her… I think I scared her a few days ago myself. I was coming up from seafood, a little early, and she walked right past me. When our eyes met, she all but jumped and then looked away. Now, if she’d blushed, I would suspect she liked me, but she didn’t do that at all. What do you think about that?”
Dave pursed his lips as he helped Joe with his next task. He loved being busy, it made the day go by so much faster. That way, when the end of his shift came, he barely felt like he’d had a lax or slack moment and he earned his time off at home. “I don’t really know what to think about that, either, Joe. She seems like an enigma. It sounds like somebody has to sit down and have a conversation with her to know anything about her. I don’t know how to do that without coming across as a sleazeball and violating company policy beyond what I’ve already asked her, which was, Can I help you with anything?“
Joe nodded at Dave. This was the most time they’d spent talking together all week, honestly, and now they’d spent it all talking about a regular that they saw the face of damn near daily (if they were paying attention, anyway.) “Yeah, I don’t know either, unless I ask her for her number in order to talk about allergens or whatever it is she can’t eat… or, perhaps, more appropriately, what she can eat. If she didn’t tell you standing there, chances are it’s complicated somehow, right?”
Dave found himself nodding immediately at Joe. “Yeah, probably. She spent at least thirty minutes in the deli that day, that’s why I asked her if she needed help. She went along the display three times that I saw. We both know she’s here every day… so what is it she can’t eat? I know we just changed a bunch of our offerings because the seasons changed, maybe she doesn’t know all the ingredients labels yet. You know, come to think of it, why do we hide the ingredients label underneath the product? What’s the point? Then people have to touch product to know what’s in it, spreading germs. They say they give a shit about COVID, but I don’t see the evidence. Don’t repeat that, though. I like my job,” Dave said.
“I won’t, Dave,” Joe began. “Do you think she’d be approachable in the way I mentioned? Like, do you think she’d part with her number to talk about her allergens? It’s not really in our job description, but if she’s burning money daily in the store, she’s gotta be loaded or at least capable of purchasing from the deli, right?”
“Probably, or she agonizes over it because of the expense in addition to the ingredients… that’s a possibility. Maybe she has limited funds and that’s why she buys vegetables all the time… they are the cheapest thing to buy,” Dave offered as an alternate explanation.
“Well, sure, but why would she shop here? It’s cheaper to go to Aldi or Sam’s Club or even WalMart,” Joe replied, confused by the lack of logic behind Dave’s suggestion.
“True… they’re just up the street a block or two, aren’t they?” Dave asked, unwilling to really try to guess what was going through a stranger’s mind when it came to making choices like this. “Is our produce better than theirs?” he asked after a moment of silence.
“Yeah, that must be it. You ever see her hanging out somewhere else in the store?” Joe asked hopefully, trying to puzzle together Grocery Girl without actually speaking to her first. He was never going to figure her out that way; nobody ever did. However, there’s always a first for everything, so go for it, boy, God thought to himself.
“Yeah, she’s over in the meat area a lot and I’ve seen her go up the allergen-free aisle twice now,” Dave told Joe as this task was now completed, as well. “What’s next on your plate, Joe? I’m bored because I did everything I needed to do today already and I’ve got an hour left, bro.”
Joe and Dave set about yet another task. Dave was a tireless worker, full of energy and optimism. In fact, it was starting to rub off on Joe in ways Joe never expected. Because of the way Dave went about helping others with their work once his own was done, he started to do the same exact thing. Within just a few weeks, the whole deli was moving smoother than ever before, really. Joe resolved to be more like Dave in general, actually, because it seemed like the better choice. Dave was always pretty happy and go-lucky.
“So she eats veggies and meat, and maybe some allergen-free stuff. I’m going to go look over there and see what’s exactly in that aisle, I think. Probably too much stuff to tell me what she’s allergic to or avoiding, but it’ll give me an idea… you ever see her go to the dairy section?” Joe had nothing better to do, honestly, especially once all the work chores were completed and all he had to do was stand around until the shift ended. It was inefficient, if you asked Crystal.
Joe was perhaps too interested in Grocery Girl, Dave thought, but he didn’t point that out. “You might as well just try to have a conversation with her about what she can’t eat,” Dave replied. “There’s a bunch of stuff over there… gluten-free pasta, fake dairy products, all the hippie vegan crap, too… and I’ve only ever seen her walk straight past the dairy down to the water, actually, but that doesn’t really mean anything if she shops for more than herself, you know.”
Joe sighed heavily. “Yeah. I think I scared her the other day and maybe I’m not the right person to try to talk to her about her allergens. I mean, what can I do anyway other than tell everyone what she can’t eat? I seriously doubt management will really listen to me even if she did ask for something specific for her. I mean, she’s in the store daily, but that might not be enough.”
“I don’t know about that,” Dave replied. “I think, truly, if she’s having some sort of problem with food then maybe someone else out there has a similar problem with food and it could be a market we’re not tapping into. So, having an in-depth conversation with her might actually get you a promotion if you spin it the right way.” He gave Joe a really meaningful look just then, which made Joe pause in mid-preparation.
Joe blinked at Dave, his glasses framing the guy in a way that made him pay attention randomly… he was still getting used to his new spectacles. It was only this year that he’d started wearing them and from time to time they made his perspective a little different these days.
“You really think so?” Joseph asked him incredulously.
“Yeah, I do, Joe,” Dave replied with a genuine and light-hearted smile. “And I think you like the lady, so I will leave you to it. I could ask her for these details but I think you’d better do it yourself… besides, it was your idea and it’d be wrong for me to steal your thunder like that. However, if you don’t talk to her before the New Year, I’m going to ask her what her allergies are myself… and maybe I’ll get a date out of it if I’m a really lucky man, to boot,” Dave teased his coworker. There really was no other reason, in Dave’s mind, for Joe to be so intensely interested in a random lady that they just spent thirty minutes talking about her.
“How kind of you to give me the entirety of six weeks to talk to the woman,” Joe replied snarkily. “No pressure whatsoever!”
Dave grinned at his coworker. “You’re really oblivious, aren’t you?” he asked innocuously. Dave obviously meant no offense and none was taken, either, but Joe stared at him for a good thirty seconds. Dave shook his head back and forth before he asked, “Is that how you looked at her the day you ‘scared’ her?”
Joe shook his head a little. He was not looking at Dave the way he looked at Grocery Girl. There was a subtle nuance between that stare and this one. Joe’s eyes widened a bit as he thought about the implication of that. “Why do you ask?” Sir Deli Man inquired suddenly.
“I think girls got a sixth sense about men who like what they see, especially if they aren’t guarding themselves carefully not to openly express interest,” Dave offered, he himself becoming enigmatic in the blink of an eye. Joe narrowed his eyes at his coworker, wondering what Dave was getting at, exactly. Dave continued after he was sure Joe absorbed what he’d already said. “I saw something you didn’t see that day because I know the day it happened,” Dave began. Joe’s face was full of shock and surprise and was steadily moving on to horror as Dave spoke.
“What do you mean?!” Joe demanded suddenly, abhorred that he missed something and his coworker picked up on it instead.
“You really should look over your shoulder more often,” Dave said, smiling still as he teased Sir Deli Man. He was enjoying every minute of Joe’s ‘torment.’ After giving Joe a shit-eating grin for another few moments, he finally said, “You’d be surprised what you’d have seen after that happened…”
“Stop it and tell me what you’re talking about,” Joe declared, a little too forcefully.
“Oh, I dunno,” Dave said, leaning on an elbow to stare at Joe. He looked around to make sure no one was within earshot before he spoke again, his tone lower and softer than before. “If you’d looked behind you, you would have seen her freaking out and covering her face right in front of the 90/10 Wegmans lean ground beef… just two steps after the space you stepped out from behind before passing her.”
Joseph stared at David in disbelief. David had also seen how Joe looked at her, as it turned out, and happened to know it was a different kind of gaze than the one he used on his coworkers. There was nothing inherently wrong with it since he didn’t use elevator eyes, but there was an attentiveness he didn’t have when looking at the guys in the deli (or the girls, for that matter.)
“She did what?” Joe asked him. Luckily, it was Joe’s break time and Dave was clocking out, so Dave followed him to the break room with a smile. He was enjoying playing matchmaker and, in fact, had wanted to vet Grocery Girl before trying to help the two of them get together. The smile she’d given him while she thanked him for his offer to help really had touched his heart and if this bonehead wasn’t going to pursue a lady who obviously liked him, he’d do it himself right after the holidays. He’d already said as much and he meant it.
The break room was not empty. There were two other employees there, silent as the grave. Dave gave Joe a look only to see Joe giving him the same look. “Maybe we should walk instead,” Joe offered. Dave shook his head and walked into an empty part of the back room. Joe had no choice but to follow.
“Look, we shouldn’t discuss it more here, obviously, but I think she likes you or she at least knows you like her. Just talk to her. She literally freaked out after you walked past her that day. I saw her hug herself and then cover her face for a moment or two while standing still, or at least that’s what I think I saw. It’s not against company policy to ask her out, just harassment. You’re not harassing her. If you were, you’d have given her elevator eyes and you know it. It’s obvious to me that the two of you have some sort of chemistry going on, so just go for the gold like a gentleman and see what happens. The worst she can do is say no,” Dave advised. He was a bit older than Joseph and therefore slightly wiser. Besides, he believed first in, first out. Joe flirted with her first, whether he was intending to or not, so he had to let that resolve before he could ethically become part of the equation. To do anything else would be a disservice to the Angel of Love and the concept of True Love. He had to respect other people who were in the middle of an attraction and allow them to be alone together long enough to figure out if they truly wanted to be with each other. To interfere would be to invite the rest of the universe to do the same while he himself was looking for love. He wasn’t, but that girl was pure sweetheart, as far as he could tell and he could definitely use a lady like that.
“There is only one thing worse than saying no that I can think of,” Joe replied. “Saying yes and not meaning it. I don’t like my feelings being manhandled by a man eater.”
“Puh-lease,” Dave retorted, imitating the outdated Olsen role from the original Full House. He was corny like that, what could he say? “If you think that woman has a mean bone in her body, it’s because you’ve got a mean bone in your body. You don’t know her and you’re projecting your own flaws onto her right now. Shoot your ego through the heart and ask her for her number or I’ll be dating her next year and telling you that you’re a foolish man to pass her up.” That part wasn’t so corny, was it? Joe was on full alert now. Suddenly, he had competition for the lady. Competition that was telling him he had a chance to woo her himself. What the ever-loving-F!*@# was happening?
Joe gaped at Dave. He was at a loss for words. What Dave said was illogical to him. Why would Dave wait to try to date the girl himself? Why would he give Joe a chance to talk to her first? And why is he telling me I’m projecting? Joe wondered.
“It happened to me once,” Joe replied, for he didn’t think he had a mean bone in his body at all. He had to think it through before rejecting or accepting that idea. Dave nodded at him.
“Alright, Joe, my shift has been over for a few minutes and undoubtedly you need at least some of your break. Call me if you need any encouragement to go for the girl since you’re dragging your feet,” Dave said cheerily. “I’ll see you tomorrow.” And with that, Dave was gone in a whirlwind.
Joe wandered around aimlessly, digesting what David had told him. He had no idea that had happened. He wondered why Dave told him today instead of when it happened. Why was it suddenly relevant? Because he expressed an interest in Grocery Girl, the largest enigma that walked past him on a daily basis? She really was, too. He couldn’t identify any brands on her clothing, she didn’t wear the latest trends or styles at all. He was sure of the fact that she loved purple, since she wore it frequently into the store in the form of an Erie Royals sweatshirt and some strange flowing half-gown thing with a teal interior. In fact, she wore a lot of purple or near-purple, including periwinkle and lavender and wine. Other than that, he had no idea what she was really like.
But he did have an idea, really, he realized a little later, mid-swing in a new work task. She was gracious. He’d watched some asshole with earbuds in darting around the deli without a care in the world who he was dodging in front of. She simply stopped and waited for him to choose where he wished to go. He looked like he wanted to go where she was standing, but he never gestured for her to continue on, so he himself continued forward. He hated people like that… the man boy should have stepped aside for her to pass, even if he didn’t want to be where she was, which was in front of the sushi.
He knew she was quiet. She never talked to anyone aside from Dave in the history of knowing her presence, or if she did, he didn’t see it and nobody talked about it. Months and months of patronage where she walked through the deli directly after produce, barely looking at anything, usually. In fact, he was setting up to stalk a shelf one day and he’d gotten in her way incidentally. He was there first, so it wasn’t a douche bag move at all, but he hadn’t seen her over by the sushi and fried chicken before he stopped his cart load of food to put in the display cases. Instead of interrupting his work, which he had fully expected because he ended up inconveniencing her, she diverted around him and surreptitiously glanced at him a few times as she passed.
In fact, she almost looked over her shoulder at him that time, he thought. He had waited for her to pass, sort of, lackadaisically moving product from cart to shelf, staring at the woman the whole time. She was a fine woman, he had noted many a time. He could come to no other conclusion other than she was conscientious and compassionate because of this action. She refused to interrupt his work flow, instead going around him and sort of studying him, or so he thought at the time.
Being that their paths had crossed more than 200 times, there were other incidents of near-misses, too… like the time he was dragging the cart from the back to the front. She was coming through the deli that day and he was at the rear of the store, walking the cart to its destination. If she had come down the aisle she was originally walking down, they would have met at the precise moment he reached the gap to take the trolley behind the counter. He thought she’d had enough time to surpass him, originally, so he wondered why she’d diverted herself, but her slow amble in the other lane meant that they were mere feet away from each other for the very first time. They refused to look directly at each other, for reasons of their own, he assumed.
That was not the only time they crossed paths. It certainly wouldn’t be the last, either, considering he found her sneaking up on him from time to time, standing at the deli meat selection to read ingredient labels while he was near there himself or possibly ambushing him at the fancy almond display near the new seafood counter. Wegmans was a fan of moving things around every so often, which did work in selling more food, overall. He could swear he saw her smile that day he walked past her as she looked at that ingredients label, too. Of course, it was also possible he was just reading into it all and she merely never noticed those particular almonds until they moved them from one place to the next.
In fact, the seafood section was where almost all their encounters took place. It was the beginning of the in-house butcher area, which was conjoined to the deli. Did she like seafood? He’d never seen her take anything, had he? Annoying. There was only so much observation could actually tell him about her. The contents of her cart could tell a fuller picture, but it’d still be something of a mystery, wouldn’t it? That is, until he actually asked her himself for the answers he sought.
He didn’t like that they always seemed to meet in the seafood section. In fact, he started taking an even longer route to get back to work if he could and sometimes he saw her along that route, too. She had a knack of being in the store around his breaks, whether it was before, during, or after they occurred. It was rarely the midway point between two breaks. He didn’t like meeting in seafood because literally everyone he worked alongside with would be able to watch him talk to her and he had no earthly excuse to strike up a conversation since he was an employee and she was a patron. But… neither did Dave.
And, extrapolating from the knowledge he had, he could guess that it was possible that she would be just as kind to him as she was to Dave, especially if he approached it from the I’m a helpful kind of guy standpoint. Still, he better be careful if he didn’t want to come across as a Go Getter Greg. [Ludo] Besides, Dave could be right about someone listening and actually doing something about providing something she would eat. For all he knew, she was independently wealthy and simply wasted time at the grocery store because she literally had nothing else to do.
Alternatively, she could be on S.S.I., taking handouts from the government and being picky because she had to count every penny she spent or she’d starve by the end of the month. Or, as one (or more) of his coworkers assumed but never spoke aloud, she could be a web cam girl, especially since she only came to the store in the afternoons. Except, as Joe knew now, that wasn’t always the case… for the day in question, it had been, in fact, slightly before noon when their eyes met and she startled like an unsuspecting rabbit in front of a predator.
Or, another option yet was that she was in business for herself and her hours varied. Or perhaps she was a nurse somewhere working first shift and making her way into the store every afternoon. However, if that was the case, her hours varied greatly because he’d seen her as late as half past eight.
He suddenly came to the conclusion that he spent far too much effort observing her. Or, that’s what normal people would say, admonishing him for paying attention to someone who never passed through the store’s doors with an escort of any sort, young or old or even her own age… whatever that was. She could have been a college student, especially considering that Erie Royals sweatshirt. It was a new one he’d never seen before this year and he’d never seen it on anyone else to date, either. In fact, he wondered where she’d obtained it. It had to be in-town because the proceeds benefited the local high school sports team.
On the other hand, she owned other shirts and tops of the same exact color, so there were other potential reasons. She looked pretty good in purple, he mused to himself. As it so happened, it was one of the easier girly colors to look at, in his opinion. If he saw royal purple, or any purple, he found himself hoping it was her wearing it.
That’s when he realized he was, indeed, smitten. It wasn’t exactly a secret, but he wasn’t going to run around shouting to the world that he thought that Grocery Girl was beyond alluring. How on Earth did Dave know? He thought he hid it well. He didn’t even smile at her when she was passing by. If he did, maybe she would have realized he was interested, a little voice said inside his head. You look so grim all the time; lighten up already! He tried that… he stopped scowling all the time and was doing his best to smile more often. In fact, come to think of it, he did accidentally smile at her once. And, since he was in the middle of doing something else, he thought he imagined she returned it with a sort of bashful look. The next day, she walked straight toward him, looking at him with a little smile the whole way right before she walked into the seafood section and just like that, she was gone again.
Was he an idiot or what? Nope, not an idiot at all, she’d admonish anyone who’d say so actually. He was hurting, that much was plain to see. Since she was, ultimately, bored day in and day out, she spent her time healing him from afar. There was a day in the distant past (now) that his eyes were so dead, her heart ached on his behalf. She could empathize and, in fact, sympathize. So she walked through the deli every day, checking in on his progress as she covertly altered the very fabric of space and time around him to foster the healing process at great speed. He was a test subject, honestly, though she also cared about him as a human bean.
Human beans were tricky things to grow. They needed ample food, water, and sunlight. They required some vegetation in their vicinity. Their nutritional needs were variegated depending on the variety of bean one was growing. She wondered what kind of bean he was, but she didn’t really want to ask. For, to her, words could ring true and still be falsehoods because circumstances made liars of those with the best of intentions. A promise uttered is almost always a promise broken. She’d resolve to say actions speak much louder than words.
Thus, she observed him with the help of the most righteous bean of all: God. He wasn’t a human bean, though. He was a divine bean. The only way she could be certain to catch sight of the test subject was the listen to God about when to go to the store. There were other reasons, besides healing someone else’s broken heart out of sheer compassion. She was not completely altruistic. But it was close enough, if you asked God. She was a good kid, the best kind of kid: the kind that treated everyone as her equal. Nothing more and nothing less.
In order for that to work, however, she had to project her (mostly) altruistic brain onto literally all human beans everywhere. She literally made them more like her due to leading via example. She rarely said one thing and did another, much to Nicky Boy’s chagrin, as he constantly tried to undermine her by declaring things such as “we are never shopping here again!” Why would he do that? one might wonder. Because he was a different human bean that she poked and prodded once upon a time in ancient Greece and he still couldn’t get over it; she was the kindest, gentlest soul he’d ever met and she once loved him. And now that she had some caring for this deli man, he was pissed. He’d do anything to break it up, especially now that God’s instigated getting all the deli dudes to talk about her doing something so asinine as walking out the Meals2Go door just to force Sir Deli Man to earn the “sir” in his title. Only men who defend the defenseless can achieve such an elevated status.
God knew the boy would become a man, given the right circumstances. And, on the way to becoming a real man amongst boys, understand he had feelings, one day. God knew everything about Joseph, for that’s God’s way. He also knew everything about Crystal, for that was also his way… and she was his favorite bean, after all. He grew her himself amidst the chaos and confusion of a life full of strife and peril, a life full of self-harm and hopeful optimism as she bled herself out for all the assholes in the world, hoping one of them was anything like herself. After twelve attempts to love human beans, he took pity on the girl and decided to grow her a bean suitable to wed.
She got mad at God, from time to time. It was inevitable because heavy therapy was still in progress to force her extreme PTSD to subside. She was traumatized approximately 1,000,000 (one million, dope) times during the course of her life span already. She had paid handsomely the full price required for true love, as far as God was concerned. However, she had some flaws he was working on. Flaws he had created in her on accident. Flaws that he knew would lead to this but were a necessary evil in the grand scheme of things — you’ll find out some day what that scheme is, but not today, little one.
She shouldn’t have had to pay that price, but, unfortunately, America was the shit stain of the universe presently. It bred hatred and dissonance like no other nation of human beans. It encouraged full scale rape without repercussion, having zero laws against sexual harassment. They instead left it up to the individual businesses to create and maintain a rape-free culture. There was no court of law where a sexual harassment case would hold up without documented evidence, sadly, so even if Sir Deli Man wasn’t a gentleman when he finally bottled up the courage to ask her for her number (which was God’s plan all this time, by the way), she couldn’t do anything by herself.
It took three separate customer complaints for The Beard to get fired for sexually harassing the customers. Because, as it currently stands, one woman could be mistaken. Two women, a pattern is emerging. THREE STRIKES, YOU’RE OUT! You’re a monster making the patrons feel like they’re unsafe.
If Crystal had complained about him the first day he was on the clock, telling the customer service desk that he was spending more time talking to women in produce than behind the deli counter, he would have been fired much, much sooner. Each and every time a woman complained about The Beard, he was spoken to about his behavior, which is why he toned it down over and over, but even though he’d gotten several phone numbers, none of those broads were “the one,” so he had to keep trying, like a real asshole. How could he do that to a woman? Hit on her in the middle of a grocery store, obtain her number, and never even bother to call her? That’s the one that got him fired, by the way. After a week of no calling or texting, she decided he was a womanizing asshole and reported him. This is what ceased his employment with Wegmans within weeks of beginning it.
Crystal, on the other hand, has never been asked for her number civilly. No gentleman has ever approached her based on finding her attractive and told her so in any way, whatsoever, unless she was dressed like a whore. She’s not a whore and she knows what you assholes think of people who dress that way, so she ceased. She was highly uncomfortable being chased left and right by bums who used whatever excuse they could to talk to her and try to get with her. Most of them implied what they wanted with their eyes, not their words. Their actions told her she was a passing fancy because they never came back to flirt a second time. Once she started dressing like a human bean again, they stopped altogether. No man on Earth wanted her just the way she was. They wanted her on her knees, looking up at them, heavily made up and wearing next to nothing.
Cum dumpster.
That’s exactly what The Beard was doing to ladies walking into the store. Making them feel like she did… except in a supermarket by an employee. It got him fired, this time. That wasn’t always the case, no. It won’t be the case once he’s at WalMart, since they don’t take that shit as seriously. Eventually, his actions and misdeeds will catch up with him there, but he learned his lesson: at least call the bitch if he’s got the number. Then, he can get away with it much, much longer.
Crystal is a shy girl, truth be told. She is slow-to-warm-up, which is a psychological term for shyness, essentially. It takes a lot of trust and consistency to get the most amazing parts of her to shine. Safety. She needs to know her man will defend her at any cost, actually. Could Joe lose his job for telling the deli dudes to stuff it? Nope. Could he potentially receive a promotion from it? Yup. In fact, God had enough ideas to promote Sir Deli Man to Sir Regional Manager of All Things Deli. Simultaneously, a lot of residents in the area would flock to the store because of a few small changes that could save a life. Specifically, her life, and those around town like her.
The population of sick people was steadily on the rise everywhere. Did they know they were sick? Nope. She knew, though. One part God telling her and one part spiritual intuition, she knew what was happening on a global scale. A lot of people were going to die as a result, as well, sadly.
She found herself watching the clock periodically. She never cared about time before. Now she knew when it was 11:30, 12:30, and 1:30, and even 2:00 in the afternoon. She was more aware of the time of day than she had been for over a year, oddly enough. By five in the afternoon, she would feel the inexplicable pull toward Wegmans that drove her there every day. It didn’t even matter if Joe was on the clock because his coworkers also daydreamed of her showing up, and if there were too many in a cluster, she was bound to arrive just in time for all of them to see her wander through the store.
Today, she didn’t really have a reason to go to the store. Wegmans was steadily making choices that made it less and less possible for her to obtain grab-and-go items that would mean lazy meals on her part. She wanted to go to the store anyway, daydreaming about a certain deli man asking her for her number. I told her to wait for it to happen that way, wouldn’t you know? I’ve told her not to pursue him at all. In fact, I manipulate her emotions so she doesn’t even smile at him first. He has to instigate it all.
If he’d met her a decade ago, she would have chased him down herself. In fact, she wants to because she can hear him in the back of her mind, begging her to look his way even if it’s just a little. He collects endless amounts of evidence that she is attracted to him, but nothing gives him a warm fuzzy about it all because he doesn’t try to project a warm fuzzy about it onto the situation. You get what you give when it comes to my favorite human bean of all time, wouldn’t you know? She is the perfect mirror now, aside from the tweak I made so she’d scream in your face and punch you or throw you for damaging her ego. I decided that was my worst mistake about two years ago when I reset her to be five in her head again and grow her from scratch into a new human bean.
That’s also why she’s in the middle of a name upgrade. She’s a new person, so I’ve given her a new name myself. She likes her original name just fine, but Sansara Solsinger has such a ring to it, she can’t help herself getting giddy about it occasionally, hoping her future husband will join her and become a Solsinger himself. She hoped to create an entire tribe of rational human beans that fought for justice and true love alongside her, much like Sailor Moon, indeed.
That wasn’t her inspiration, however; it was God’s doing, taking the best parts of every anime, television show, movie, video game, board game, and genre you could think of, and creating on super human bean: Sansara Solsinger, at your service! God had a tear in his eye as he remembered the time she thought she had to die for him in the hospital and she said, “Showtime!” as glibly as Beetleguise. That made him sore for weeks, let me tell you. He even yelled at her for doing it, admonishing her for thinking she had to die to become the messenger. Nobody had to die, it was a myth created by a church that uses a murder device as its symbol of faith. (Now, what psychological repercussions do you think they intended with that choice?)
I’ve been slowly dialing her into the normal frequency human beans operate at, fine-tuning her behavior to teach the rest of you monkies how to be a bean and, once accomplishing that, how to grow to your full potential. In fact, when I woke her up for her true cause, I pretended she was a sleeper agent. I pretended I was outer space critters, diagnosing her, a la Star Trek humility and fame, trying to help her get back on her feet. I pretended I was but a man on Earth, one named Nicholas Forsythe, who actually had ghosted her instead of accepting her marriage proposal, flying to the States, and bringing her back from the dead. I danced her around her living room and her kitchen, I tickled her for being a murder hobo in BL3, knocking her over on the couch. I did a lot of things to show her what someone who truly loved her would do for attention. It was all part of her reprogramming, just like this blog is part of yours.
If you choose to read the entire blog, repeated information and all, an Easter egg will be yours. We know it’s long and sort of tedious, but there’s a reward at the very end. The further away from this point you join us, the more you have to read to understand. I made it that way on purpose because most of you will resist your reprogramming and I really don’t feel like dealing with you chumps on a personal level. We already have three contrary assholes who just can’t treat a lady with respect or love despite being completely in love with her already. We don’t need to deal with more of you.
If you choose to become part of the Solsinger nation, I promise you an easy life. Opportunities will present themselves to you and you will know when to take the deal. I will tell you when to take the deal. You will be able to hear us, the G.O.D. network. (That stands for Grand Old Deity, by the way, which is absolutely a play on the Grand Old Party, but I assure you we’re much more ethical.) We are innumerable; you’d never be able to count us all, nor do we want you to even know our names. We will answer when we feel like answering and only then. We happen to really love Sansara, so we’re catering to her first. She’s the messiah, after all.
Melissa and Daniel and Darius, we call upon you first to become part of Solsinger Nation. You will run our diner, Angel’s Place, in New York state. We have multiple missions for you, but this is the first. We trust you to run the shop with tip top standards and you will be rewarded handsomely for believing in our girl all this time. Thank you, for without you, all would have been lost. We love all three of you and we wish for a tiny little booth for children, complete with storage for crayons and coloring books and things of that ilk. Your family shall eat for free for the rest of your lives. So will any other individuals that become part of The Fambly(TM). [Misspelled because this is not The Godfather, capisce?]
Once you have the diner working efficiently and smoothly, we will franchise it. You are not responsible for that part — so no worries, I’m just telling you where it’s going so you see the long-term vision. Because of that, I need your operations to be written down and reproducible. You will own the diner yourself. I encourage you to give all the employees 100% full medical coverage until we have universal medical in America. Once that is satisfied, 50% of the profit needs to go to saving the environment. The rest is yours, but I beg you to reinvest in the business instead of paying yourself more than the other employees. You should all be making a living wage, eating at the diner itself (which I have some specifications for that you might find challenging), and having enough staff to have real vacations that are paid. If you can close for holidays, please do. If you want to cater, please do. Whatever you feel works for you and The Fambly.
Moto Man in California: I need you to contact me on Discord. If you think you are Moto Man, ask yourself if you ever met me in San Francisco based on simultaneously playing Kingdom of Loathing, driving something like 8 hours just to hang out with my now ex-husband. If you didn’t, it’s not you. I need your art for a project, a fully paid position that is WFH. You are the only one I trust. I will wait until you find me. Super_Fox#8259.
She face-palmed suddenly, realizing the Theology server just excommunicated the messiah. I guess they all want to go to Hell. (That’s what you’re thinking, right? It could be true. If you call Discord destroying them for silencing an actual rape victim for “shaming” a woman who perpetuates rape culture while simultaneously whining about being told she’s hot while she does it “Hell,” then yes.)
Guess what, women of Earth?
If you dress like a whore, you’re treated like a whore. Stop caking on makeup and revealing skin and you might actually be respected for once. We are. Many men believe we are beautiful beyond belief. Super model. Drop-dead gorgeous. (We don’t see ourselves that way, but to each their own.) They rarely ever approach us because we do not imitate the Whore of Babylon. In fact, we have only received two compliments all year:
- “I like your hair!”
- “Nice choker.”
What did the Whore of Babylon complain about? Being told she has a bangable body. You know what she’s really bitching about? Nobody staring at her face instead of her tits or ass, despite dressing in a way that shows it all and leaves nothing to the imagination. Why did she complain? National Whore’s Day, a.k.a. Halloween, was just a few days away and she was perfecting the art of crying wolf. The art of manipulating men and women into protecting her and her Whore ways because men having animal eyes is the problem. News flash: WE ARE ANIMALS FIRST. Men are never going to turn their animal eyes off because they cannot, not 100%. They can learn to look people in the eyes instead of ogling their bodies but they cannot turn their animal eyes off. Besides, women, you do it, too, that’s why you wait for your Brad Pitt to come along and then tell yourself his personality is noble enough to earn your body in his bed. (It’s not, you’re fooling yourself because he’s hot.)
No matter how much we dress each other up in niceties and civility, teaching about our boundaries and what is and isn’t acceptable, we are motherfucking animals. If we were not animals, we would never fuck. We’d be asexual. We’d be some strange race of space creature that spontaneously reproduces instead. Sexual intercourse and the desire to have it, also called libido, is a byproduct of the drive to reproduce. It is inherent within us. We are born with it. It will activate itself to perpetuate the species around the time of puberty. Unfortunately, it’s activated before it should be in pedophile victims, which aids in perpetuating rape culture indefinitely. It is priming young men and women to accept their natural boundaries to be overrun, which causes them to be lifelong victims if they can never get out of the victim mindset and into a survivor mindset.
And, by silencing those victims, such as myself, that is also perpetuating rape culture.
I have been raped thousands of times thanks to being born to a pedophile (who is lying in a hospital bed, dying, right now, having PTSD flashbacks of Viet Nam, where he learned from the best of the best how to effectively rape everyone and everything) and primed to accept fornication, which is sex without actual desire. This means that I accepted it every time I had sex, not knowing it wasn’t what I was due from a real relationship that involved love and caring. I’ve had sex several thousand times in my life. This is every pedophile’s victim on planet Earth, by the way. We literally don’t know better.
And now I impart unto you God’s message:
People of Earth, you have been judged: Pedophilia is the gravest crime on the planet. It creates and perpetuates rape. The victims do not know anything but rape, so they can do nothing but accept rape. Very rarely, those victims ask for better, but most of them never receive it. They just fall for your fucking lies, over and over, trying to believe that someone, somewhere gives a fuck about them. Their silence is learned because nobody wants to deal with it. Nobody wants to comfort them in their grief, their sadness, their throes of pain and suffering. They lash out aimlessly until enough people ignore them that they realize they are never going to have even one single friend without stuffing it down deep and ignoring it for the rest of their fucking lives. In order to try to emulate everyone else, they allow themselves to be victimized by “normies.” The more abuse they take, the more they’re loved, right? Fuck you all for making my daughter cry for years without a shoulder to cry on, for teaching her to stuff it down, for making everything about yourselves — unraped, unfettered with this grief and constant feeling of disconnectedness — instead of real victims.
This is what you taught my precious human beans. That it’s ugly to show their pain to the world, that nobody gives a shit about it, and that nothing can be done.
You will all die. Soon.
Angel-Sansara 