Why Does This Always Happen to Me?
I’m not sure why, but I’ve always enjoyed wandering around convenience stores and gas stations. It’s just one of the weird idiosyncrasies that come with being neurodivergent.
Usually, that is not a problem. I would say that 99.9 percent of the time, it is not a problem. Unfortunately, I stumbled into the 0.000009 percent of the time it causes an unnecessary kerfuffle.
I love my neighborhood, but there is only one convenience store—Food Mart—within a two-mile radius, so I went there quite often.
Sometimes I would perambulate about the store without buying anything. This made the fifty-something man who owns and runs the convenience store very angry. He would glare at me, and then one afternoon, he exploded.
“If you don’t buy anything, get out! Get out! You’re not wanted here! Get out!” he screamed at me about two years ago.
Incidentally, I did buy a lot from the store, but not enough for this unpleasant fellow’s taste.
Nobody likes to be the target of incoherent, unwarranted rage, particularly over something as silly and minor as not buying something at a convenience store.
The convenience store where I am no longer welcome.
I was insulted and hurt. I didn’t want to be banned from the only convenience store within walking distance for not being an enthusiastic enough consumer. I hate conflict, and this seemed like the most needless conflict in the history of the universe.
I also didn’t want to give money to a business owner who treated me like a shoplifting thirteen-year-old just because, to be fair, that is the vibe I give off despite being a forty-nine-year-old husband, father, and small business owner.
At the same time, I wasn’t shocked. Shit like that happens to me all the time. I feel profoundly unlucky. I am superstitious, which means that I must have shattered a bunch of mirrors and walked under many ladders, and that’s why my luck is so consistently terrible.
So I vowed not to return to this awful man’s store for a while.
I avoided the Food Mart in Alpharetta for a solid year. In that time, I lost fifty pounds due to depression and dental issues. I may or may not have become unrecognizable to strangers like the apoplectic bully who runs the convenience store.
About three months ago, I started going to the convenience store because it was convenient. That’s kind of the whole purpose of convenience stores. They’re convenient. They’re nearby. They have things you need but don’t want to have to travel to a grocery store to procure.
Today I went to the Food Mart in Alpharetta. When I started to leave without buying anything, the owner once again screamed at me that if I didn’t buy anything, I should get the fuck out, and stay the fuck out.
This awful man gestured angrily while he yelled that I was no longer welcome.
It was not entirely unexpected, but it was terrible.
I was already having a bad day. I receive my Patreon payment on the sixth of each month, which serves as a dispiriting reminder that the monthly haul here is half of what it was at the site’s peak, and it wasn’t doing particularly well then, either.
If I were in a cartoon, I would have a dark cloud hovering over me and steam coming out of my ears. I was mad. I really should stop carrying a backpack with me everywhere. It makes me seem less like a proper adult and more like an overgrown manchild.
I was angry. I was distracted. I was not paying as much attention to the world around me as I should have, because I fell on hard concrete.
At first, I thought I’d gotten away with just a scratch or bruise, but when I looked at my lower leg, I saw that I had a massive, painful lump.
I fall down a lot. I'd fallen down and landed inelegantly on concrete about three weeks before and incurred an even bigger lump on my leg.
I’m clumsy. I don’t know why. When I was in college, I would fall down because I was drunk, but I haven’t drunk alcohol in over a year. I stopped smoking pot. Whenever I fall, I am 100 percent sober.
I had hoped that not falling down anymore would become a wonderful side effect of not drinking. That proved not to be the case. If anything, I fall more often now than I did at the height/depth of my alcohol consumption.
The fucked up thing is that being angrily banned from the only nearby convenience store and falling down and getting a giant lump on my leg is pretty much my normal. That kind of shit happens to me all the time, and I take concrete measures to remain upright whenever I know how clumsy I can be and how painful the consequences are.
It’s one thing to experience autistic burnout in middle age and find yourself unable to do things like get a good job with benefits or sell a book to a major publisher. It's quite another to find yourself seemingly incapable of such basic tasks as frequenting a nearby convenience store without somehow engendering the white-hot rage of its owner without ever speaking a word to him or walking down the street without tumbling gracelessly to the ground regularly on what seems to be at least a monthly basis.
I’m screwing up the big things and the little things. I'm struggling. It sometimes feels like I'll always struggle. Life is like quicksand for me: the more I try to get out of a perilous situation, the deeper and deeper I sink.
Oh well. I’m writing this from a Publix grocery store, and all three staples of my diet—Mountain Dew, Ice Cream, and cereal—are on sale. Buy one, get one free, baby!
That made me smile and feel slightly less despondent. If I’m going to curse the mundane bad luck that makes me feel overwhelmed and fearful, then I should also note and appreciate the minor good luck that makes life slightly easier.
Sometimes that’s nothing more than getting two pints of Ben & Jerry’s for the price of one, but I appreciate it all the same.
If you’d like to make my life slightly less impossibly difficult, you can support me in the following ways:
You can pre-order The Fractured Mirror, my mammoth, soon-to-be-released book here: https://the-fractured-mirror.backerkit.com/hosted_preorders
Nathan needed expensive, life-saving dental implants, and his dental plan didn’t cover them, so he started a GoFundMe at https://www.gofundme.com/f/support-nathans-journey-to-dental-implants. Give if you can!
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