I don’t want to be like this anymore

Yesterday evening I went shopping for my regular magazines and my mother’s Christmas present.  I don’t celebrate Christmas myself but I see no reason to force others into having a miserable time because of my personal convictions so I dutifully went to purchase the only gift I have left to get.  It was the most hellish shopping trip I’ve ever been on and forced me to confront the reality of what it is to be me.

Thanks to my local shops not stocking my favourite magazines I have to take a bus to Lakeside Shopping Centre about a mile or so away from me which cost me a total of £6.20 as my estranged wife was coming too and I was paying the fares.  My magazines are due in on a Wednesday so I had arranged to meet my ‘wife’s’ bus in Grays which meant that £4 had already been spent on her fare.  The bus was, of course, late and the temperature was almost freezing.

What angered me was the fact that, when we got to the WH Smiths in Lakeside, I found that my magazines had not been delivered.  There was no sign of any staff member to ask if the magazines had been delivered but not put out yet or, indeed, why the delivery hadn’t come.  All I was left assuming was that the delivery hadn’t arrived because there had been a thick frost on the ground in the morning and that always causes a problem in the south east of England, a fact that makes us the laughing stock of the areas of the planet that suffer from deep snow drifts during winter but manage to keep on moving.

I had seen something my mother had asked for in one shop but, wanting to get a better quality version, decided to go to Marks & Spencer where she had pointed out the style she wanted.  When I got to M&S, the item cost £1.50 more and the quality was actually inferior to the version in the previous store.  I was not in a position, time-wise, to make the 20 minute walk back to the previous shop so I was left unable to buy the present I had gone out to buy.

I was fuming by this point because, not only did it mean I had wasted the bus fare on a pointless trip but also that I had no idea how much money I could afford to spend on the boxer shorts I needed.  As most of the boxers I own currently are full of holes by now I had no option but to buy the cheapest 3-pack I could afford to get.  However, even this was to prove an angering experience because of the lack of selection in my size (as I mentioned in “Pet peeves”, I’m considered a XXL kind of guy now).  There were plenty of XS, S, M and L sizes in a variety of colours and designs but only one in XXL.

My ‘wife’, noticing the time, decided we should grab dinner in Burger King because her dinner would take a lot of preparation and she prefers to eat no later than 6pm.  As we sat at the table, I was suddenly hit with the desire to cry because I really hated the fact that I had become so angry and depressed with an essentially wasted trip.  I was (and still am) angry that I have to walk to Lakeside, an 80 minute round-trip, because I don’t have the money to get the bus again.  I realised that I am so sensitive to things that I go from zero to full-blown frothing-at-the-mouth angry within seconds over situations that I should just be able to shrug off and file under ‘Life Sucks’ but I can’t.  My anger comes with a side order of depression and self-loathing and a dessert of hatred of the human race.  I hate the person I’ve become and I really don’t want to be like this anymore.