This journal entry is a long rant, and it is probably offensive and misogynistic. For this reason, I am putting it in NSFW tags.
So, I was standing in the electronics aisle looking for video consoles and game disks or cartridges for various incarnations of Atari, Nintendo, Playstation, XBox, etc. Suddenly, there was a commotion at the other end of the aisle. I looked -- Some monstrous creature was soundlessly gliding toward me. Startled and frightened shoppers frantically scrambled out of its way leaving a clear a path before it. I had been examining a fine Leica lens photo developer aparatus ($25) and nearly dropped it when I saw it. My eyes must have nearly bugged out of my head with fright. I am ashamed of my reaction. This is the only time in my life that I was actually shocked by the appearance of another human being. Though to be fair to myself, it still hadn't registered in my mind that she was in fact a human. It took a long crazy moment for me to start to realize what I was seeing. During this long moment, all kinds of thoughts ran through my head. My response was visceral, like fight or flight panic. Some nightmare entity, a shuggoth out of Lovecraft I first thought, out of a bad trip had somehow gotten into Good Will and now bore down on me. Or maybe I was about to be run down by a piece of heavy machinery, like a fork lift, that some madman on a homicidal rampage just hijacked or even a robot running amok. Or soemthing from a horror movie. I stared, frozen like the proverbial deer caught in headlights, at the oncoming danger.
Slowly, what I saw started to make sense. She was piloting some kind of tricked out gurney. This gurney was enormous, being very wide and reinforced with extra support posts and heavy wheels -- In hindsight, these modifications must have been necessary for the contraption to bear such a large mass. Her weight must have been near 1/2 ton and far too heavy for ordinary human legs (Or a wheel chair or even a power chair) to support. The gurney had been rigged with a motor and joy stick to control it. Mounted on the back were several gas cylinders with a network of tubes and wires coming out of them. One of them was most likely an oxygen tank since it fed a breathing tube that was wedged under her nose. I still hadn't recovered from my shock and all of this must have happened in a couple of seconds, but it seems much longer. The oncoming vehicle had pillows, and pink blankets draped everything, pilot and gurney included. blankets. In an opening in one of her blankets, I noticed a bare arm that was carrot orange in color and swollen to more than 1 foot in thickness. I glanced at her face. Also carrot orange, the distended folds of flesh were covered with boils and pustules that had first given me the impression of erupting with myriads of eyes. She (still not quite sure on the gender) was attended by a skinny boy or man, himself a contrasting oddity beside her with his extreme thinness and gangly-ness (120 pounds, 6' or so, 20-40 years old, no idea how old really). Picture the scene from the David Lynch's 1980s Dune movie. Baron Harkonen (she was much fatter). attended by his catamite. Horrible boils, carrot-colored skin, breathing apparatus, levitating machine for moving around, she had it all. The man/boy would grab various kitchen appliances off the shelves when she pointed at them and hold them close to her squinting face so she could see them better. How could having yet more ways to prepare food help her? Anyway, they interacted liek they could be a couple. Some men are into that.
I eventually broke free of the fascination and "hid" in another part of the store that was buffered within a tight maze of heavy furniture. She went up and down several more of the wide aisles, always sweeping them clear of other shoppers. A little later, I noticed her cut to the front of a long checkout line. Not waiting your turn in a long queue is considered extremely rude in the US, but nobody said anything when she did it. Actually, the entire line of peopel sort of fell apart and moved away as she approached, so I'm not 100% sure what happened there- if she did it on purpose or not, but she did steer for the head of the line.
NSFW:
Late in the cool, sunny afternoon the other day, I was shopping at the second-hand store "Good Will." Good Will is a nation-wide retail thrift store chain taht uses its revenue to provide employment, training, and other services to those who need it. I play video games as a hobby, and one genre of games I'm interested is old TV-set console games. GoodWill sells these games taht cost several hundred dollars a few years ago for $5-$10 today.It was a terrible, indescribable thing vaster than any subway train—a shapeless congeries of protoplasmic bubbles, faintly self-luminous, and with myriads of temporary eyes forming and un-forming as pustules of greenish light all over the tunnel-filling front that bore down upon us, crushing the frantic penguins and slithering over the glistening floor that it and its kind had swept so evilly free of all litter.
— H. P. Lovecraft, At The Mountains of Madness
So, I was standing in the electronics aisle looking for video consoles and game disks or cartridges for various incarnations of Atari, Nintendo, Playstation, XBox, etc. Suddenly, there was a commotion at the other end of the aisle. I looked -- Some monstrous creature was soundlessly gliding toward me. Startled and frightened shoppers frantically scrambled out of its way leaving a clear a path before it. I had been examining a fine Leica lens photo developer aparatus ($25) and nearly dropped it when I saw it. My eyes must have nearly bugged out of my head with fright. I am ashamed of my reaction. This is the only time in my life that I was actually shocked by the appearance of another human being. Though to be fair to myself, it still hadn't registered in my mind that she was in fact a human. It took a long crazy moment for me to start to realize what I was seeing. During this long moment, all kinds of thoughts ran through my head. My response was visceral, like fight or flight panic. Some nightmare entity, a shuggoth out of Lovecraft I first thought, out of a bad trip had somehow gotten into Good Will and now bore down on me. Or maybe I was about to be run down by a piece of heavy machinery, like a fork lift, that some madman on a homicidal rampage just hijacked or even a robot running amok. Or soemthing from a horror movie. I stared, frozen like the proverbial deer caught in headlights, at the oncoming danger.
Slowly, what I saw started to make sense. She was piloting some kind of tricked out gurney. This gurney was enormous, being very wide and reinforced with extra support posts and heavy wheels -- In hindsight, these modifications must have been necessary for the contraption to bear such a large mass. Her weight must have been near 1/2 ton and far too heavy for ordinary human legs (Or a wheel chair or even a power chair) to support. The gurney had been rigged with a motor and joy stick to control it. Mounted on the back were several gas cylinders with a network of tubes and wires coming out of them. One of them was most likely an oxygen tank since it fed a breathing tube that was wedged under her nose. I still hadn't recovered from my shock and all of this must have happened in a couple of seconds, but it seems much longer. The oncoming vehicle had pillows, and pink blankets draped everything, pilot and gurney included. blankets. In an opening in one of her blankets, I noticed a bare arm that was carrot orange in color and swollen to more than 1 foot in thickness. I glanced at her face. Also carrot orange, the distended folds of flesh were covered with boils and pustules that had first given me the impression of erupting with myriads of eyes. She (still not quite sure on the gender) was attended by a skinny boy or man, himself a contrasting oddity beside her with his extreme thinness and gangly-ness (120 pounds, 6' or so, 20-40 years old, no idea how old really). Picture the scene from the David Lynch's 1980s Dune movie. Baron Harkonen (she was much fatter). attended by his catamite. Horrible boils, carrot-colored skin, breathing apparatus, levitating machine for moving around, she had it all. The man/boy would grab various kitchen appliances off the shelves when she pointed at them and hold them close to her squinting face so she could see them better. How could having yet more ways to prepare food help her? Anyway, they interacted liek they could be a couple. Some men are into that.
I eventually broke free of the fascination and "hid" in another part of the store that was buffered within a tight maze of heavy furniture. She went up and down several more of the wide aisles, always sweeping them clear of other shoppers. A little later, I noticed her cut to the front of a long checkout line. Not waiting your turn in a long queue is considered extremely rude in the US, but nobody said anything when she did it. Actually, the entire line of peopel sort of fell apart and moved away as she approached, so I'm not 100% sure what happened there- if she did it on purpose or not, but she did steer for the head of the line.
