Last night the F-word had a friend over for dinner and to take my mind off of the monstrous situation at work, I decided to make us some muffins a little late in the evening. So off to the small Turkish shop at the top of the kitty corner street.
A little background. Halfway up the kitty corner street, there's a residence for retarded adults. Sorry if 'retarded' is a bad word now wherever you live. The residents have a spectrum of conditions - a few people with Downs' and lots of others with problems that are quite physically obvious but not quite so obviously diagnosable during a casual stroll down the street. The one unifiying factor, as far as I can tell, is that they're all dealing with physically obvious brain problems.
One of them, an older lady wearing pyjamas and drooling ever so slightly, pushed into the store in front of me muttering a bit. She zipped off to the soda section, carefully counted out four large bottles of Fanta, and zipped up to the single cash register, pushing in front of the small line that had formed there, to pay with the exact change that she was clutching. All of this was fine with me despite me, at that point, standing in said line, indeed being the next person in it that was pushed to one side. Good for her, I thought. She's on a mission for the Fanta and she's carrying it out. Everybody's relying on her and she's coming through for them. It reminded me of my maiden solo drive to the beer store in Canada a few months ago, when I had parked like a retard, so preoccupied was I with safely getting the plank of Molson back to Magnum and his buddies.
What wasn't so fine with me is that seconds after she pushed up to the cash, a second line suddenly materialized behind her. In fact I even think a couple of people lining up in my queue dropped out of it to queue behind her. She even had to push past them on her way out of the shop with the precious Fanta.
Now, there was little enough practical annoyance for me in this. I'm half guinea, I've spent years of my life in the rudest cities in Italy, the fucking international capital of illicit line-cutting, and I've done years of jeet kune do; nobody buds in front of me without my fucking consent, and I simply manouvered my elbow in front of the solar plexus of the man who'd started the second queue to hand my money to the rather bemused cashier.
But as I walked home afterwards it dawned on me: that was Belgium. That was a parable of what Belgium is. Belgium is a place where people will queue up behind a retarded lady who's drooling a little bit who pushes her way past an existing queue to pay for four large bottles of Fanta with exact change if they think it will shave 30 fucking seconds off their trip to the corner store, and then they'll act surprised and wounded when you gently but firmly elbow them in the gut to get them out of your way.
This is a very silly place.
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