The day of Tuts and Sausage Rolls

My local corporate bakery is having a strange promotion at the moment. They've decked their store out in a Mexican theme, but have placed on the counter a cactus of frighteningly deep green and stuck a bright sticker that says pinata on it - the sticker is bright orange and hurts your eyes if you stare at it for too long. It's 1ne of those things that's annoying me, the mislabelled item that stares back at me every day while I buy my increasingly expensive sandwich. However it has been a good foil for me to queue jump, as the odd elderly patron searching for a stray muffin from the sample tray will stare it like it's a magic eye puzzle. I can see their elderly brain taxed as they restrain themselves from talking to strangers about the poorly labelled slight on Mexican culture. I mean if they affixed a sticker to a set of bagpipes that said haggis, I know I'd be offended. As they stare though, they miss their call to be served, and that's where I step in, sliding up to the counter quickly before they know what's happened. At least, that's what I imagined happened today, because the alternate theory is the old woman in front of me had some kind of hypnotic seizure, because she was absolutely still for about 5ive minutes, not even a fibre on her camel coat twitching as she stood in the queue. The Danishes she was staring at aren't that good, believe me. After I while I was genuinely concerned, and thought about poking her with a stick to see if she was alive, until a current of excitement brought her back to life and she yelled out the word sausage roll with a ferocity that the taste of pastry and meat fermenting before her didn't really deserve. She looked genuinely at her food based outburst of Tourettes and paid with her head down and her eyes never looking at her server, an amiable blonde girl who pretends nothing has gone wrong. I suspect from the servers glazed expression and lack of intellect she has mixed the cactus and the pinata just as she's mixed the old womans sandwich on the cash register with a 90ty item, but that's just an assumption...

My local cash converters is showing signs of deep malaise. The pile of VHS tapes that was 1nce so mighty and proud is now flimsy and weak, a corner pile of 7even tapes that reveal that even in an economic decline no 1ne wants tapes with Billy Blanks on the cover. The staff have even relaxed their what are you looking at you scruffy herbert habit of massing around the edge of the desk and staring, as if relaxed by the failing health of the store. Come 1ne come all they say now, we will continue our conversation and allow you to peruse our falling quality merchandise. Although to be honest, there is a certain wonderful comic irony that I can at least appreciate in the street where Cash Converters is. A cheesecake shop in which a rather surly and portly Samoan girl works in splendid isolation is now next door to a 24our gym, with American slogans painted on it to encourage the vapid and lazy to enter. I would be the perfect target for these motivational slogans were I not too vapid and lazy to be lured by cheap American slogans. Disheartened by the lack of VHS tapes, I wander blinking into the fading light unburdened by any purchases, as a girl who clearly got the memo from the Murdoch Papers that big is in emerges from the gym eating a giant bag of Doritos, quite proudly rejecting the thumping techno pounding within the gym in favour of a snack based product. Outside KFC, which lacks the irony of being near anything healthy, an argument breaks out. 2wo girls in matching tops lash out at each other over issues of race, sexual morality and gender identity. Sure these complicated issues are discussed with several short swear words interlocked in the middle of the argument, but you get the jist. Eventually, both are held back by larger, rougher looking girls in bomber jackets and restrained from the mutually weak slaps they are exchanging by force. I don't suspect their fight stemmed from disappointment at the lack of VHS tapes in Cash Converters. That, I suspect, is uniquely my concern...

There's an elderly Chinese woman sitting at a table in a space 1nce occupied by people selling flying magical pens. This woman has shown no signs of their showmanship during her rental of this space - the people selling the magical flying pens would leap to their feet whenever they saw a customer, just to transform their pen into a flying object. Sometimes they would work up clever lyrics to a popular song and put the word pen in the song. It was wasted on me, because I hate song parodies, but I appreciated their effort. In contrast, the elderly Chinese woman sits monastically and stoically at her desk, barely moving an eyebrow and sitting perfectly still all day long. Affixed to her desk is a sticker that says DIY bracelets, and with all the affixing and staring that's going on today, I think she's a Chinese cousin of the woman in the bakery to be honest. She's moved so little during her rental of the table and space combo that must be on sale from Centre Management that I genuinely feel that DIY Bracelets is something that goes on around her. You literally make your own bracelet and take it away while she sits staring outwardly, never moving, not even for a second, an immobile presence in a slough of frenzied meaningless activity. Sadly, my image of her was blown when the aforementioned affixed sticker plunged to the floor due to poor application of blutack, and she let out a gigantic tut, and stamped her heel on the floor like a moody teenager, before settling back down into her continued 1ne woman vigil. Ever viligant. Ever staring. Ever on guard of the little bits that make up a bracelet. Ever ready to snap like a twig at the slightest inconvenience...

It's been an exhausting day. I'm too tired to debate the whys and wherefores of what sport coaches should have done by e-mail any longer, nor can I stand the musings of Guy Sebastian for a second longer. I don't really want to peruse the newly installed corporate bookstore for fear of being seduced by it's comfortable couches and pleasant Irish sales staff who may or may not be Irish to begin with. I don't feel like wandering around KMart and running into my curly haired nemesis or lurking around Big W just to see what night out eyed Panda Eyed girl will talk about next. I feel as flat and listless as most of the people walking around - the 1nes who haven't taken their kids "oop north" to Burnie for a vacation, a treat as it were. I wonder if Maggies Bazaar is up there. I end up in a local hospitable cafe, full of people who used to work in other hospitable cafes before it was bought out by a fat bloke in a T-shirt who never bothers to shave. The girl behind the counter is as terrible as me at small talk, but given that her boss is stirring a coffee nearby, she is obliged to give it a go. Like Moe from the Simpsons asking about them current events, she pushes herself to give it a go, a line of purple eye shadow inelegantly applied to her as she asks with stuttering Steady Eddie steps how my day was. I shrug ineffectually, because I never know to answer that question, and we stand for an age because she's so caught up in the silence and scrambling for something to say she forgets what I've asked for, and in a panic, loses her grip on my change, and sends it scattering to the 4our corners to the cafe. Age shall not weary me, nor the years condemn, but I won't scramble on the floor for a 5cent piece. I smile politely and take my RedEye to my next adventure, while she stands frozen on the spot apologizing non verbally, which I presume is the standard pose for the day, as I txt some nonsense excuse about a party that's a world away, because it helps to get in early...

Given her clumsiness, awkwardness, ineptitude at small talk...she could have been perfect for me...in another world...