Anxiety Dreaming

All I was trying to buy was a single can of creamed corn to add to a dinner that Elaine was already cooking at home. The idea was to pop in quicly and get home in time to include this in the meal. In theory a simple thing. However, all the checkouts were busy and ahead of me in the "express" line was a shrill hausfrau of the portly rural variety, the kind that lives in a double wide trailer and decorates it with gnomes and flamingoes. She had a number of cakes (but less than 15 so it was "OK" for her to be in the express line) and was demanding that each be carefully boxed and bagged so as not to ruin the icing. This took considerable time. Then she requested cigarettes which the clerk had to leave to get. He brought back the wrong ones and had to leave again. Then and only then she began looking for the 417 discount cards, coupons, Air-Miles cards, and whatnot in her medical-bag sized purse. Because some critical 50¢ discount had not be rung in in advance the clerk had to take her over to the customer service desk and there I was, standing alone in the express line with a can of creamed corn in my hand while 20 minutes had already gone by. I lost my patience and reached over and grabbed the paging microphone. Holding up my can of corn in one hand and facing the other checkouts I announced to the store, "I've been waiting 20 minutes to try and buy one goddamned can of corn. Would anybody *please* let me step ahead of them in line so I can get the fuck out of here?"

One young woman of the "I was popular in high school and now I have an SUV and 2.5 kids variety" a couple lines over put up her hand. She was second in line in her line. I walked over and thanked her. The hausfrau behind her glared at me for robbing for my gaul and I snarled back and turned my back. The person who was ahead of me finished up paying for their groceries, and then the cashier took out the cash drawer and walked away. The cashier went over to the customer service desk, where the first clerk and the hausfrau with the cakes were still sqabbling over the 50¢ discount, and proceeded to start chatting with another clerk who also had their cash drawer in hand (clearly a shift change or relief for a break). For a moment I waited for the new clerk to come over and reopen the checkout, but then some confusion between the two clerks took place. Apparently there was some trouble with the number of pennies in their cash drawers and they both proceeded to count their pennies.

At this point I completely lost it, threw the can at the two cash drawers causing the glass top of the customer counter to collapse and the money from the cash drawers to spill all over the floor and I began to walk out. The store's rent-a-cop attempted to stop me and I knocked him over on my way out. "Never come back to this store!" he yelled after me. "Like I fucking would!" I yelled back without looking and flipped him the bird over my shoulder.

For the most part I am of the "making sense of randomly firing neurons" school of dream causation, but I am also aware that the neural pathways most likely to be used are those that have most often been recently used. For example, Elaine and I did have creamed corn with dinner last night, so it is no surprise that I was trying to buy creamed corn. We also talked about my needing to stop by the store on the way home today to pick up milk and a couple other little things so it is no surprise that the dream was set in a supermarket. These things were on my mind. It is the incorporation of the frustration at waiting for minutae and nonsensical procedure that is interesting.

The woman with the cakes and the penny-counting clerks were created out of my frustration with work lately. Last week I had to wait a week for a single line of text for a single web-page to be approved by the manager of corporate communications. She works out of Kelowna, which to me is just another BFE town beyond Hope, and while not in appearance she is in impression the rural hausfrau worried about the icing being just right for a cake that is going to be presented on a worn-out picnic table in the middle of a white-trash trailer park. A hundred million dollars was just spent to buy my now former employer and I'm watching people squabble over saving $100 here or there rather than just getting things done, thus the 50¢ coupon.

Basically work has turned into a great big pile of shit and my dream is a nice accessable metaphor for what it feels like.