n e u f n e u f: it might just be my particular brand of agoraphobia

09 October 2010

it might just be my particular brand of agoraphobia

[click image]

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Which isn't really a fear of the marketplace, but rather something akin to impatience so quickly becoming so heavily charged to such an exquisite extent that it makes me bolt from most retail environments before I can even accomplish what I'd set out to accomplish there from the start. This has been a problem for me, with varying levels of success combatting acute attacks since I was about thirty years old... and worst in grocery stores. I have long stretches where I can only shop for food in a tiny market off the beaten path... or mad dashes through supermarkets at 3am.... It doesn't feel wrong. It feels right, as though my gut knows how much lethal asininity is rightfully endurable or something....

A later development in this not really phobic phobia is the awareness of employees not letting you be in an aisle alone, feeling people take an odd interest in your movements, people situating themselves in relation to you in a bent aspect, strange jargon bleating out the store's address system. There's a store in Brookings where cameras log the traffic patterns in the store, the object being, employees are told, to best calculate where in the store certain goods would be most optimally placed, but, really, think about it, it would be a program trained to spot unusual movements... which makes me laugh when I think of it trying to make head or tail of my "pattern".

Even if you never saw anything as overt as this little DHS ditty, even if somehow you never heard mention of any crime or terrorism or anything unsettling, it is most likely you are moving through your world uneasily, not dreaming to leave anything unlocked or unattended, wishing to take cover, not to be exposed. Walking through a big parking lot to get to your car feels almost like a horror movie nowadays, does it not? Check. We know so much more than we ever stop to think about or name or heed, let alone give ourselves credit for. You do not feel safe.

This would be a big part of why... and yet I bet it never crossed your mind to call them up and bitch about it.

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love, 99
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