Take a seat please
In shopping centres there are usually strategically placed 3 person seats or seats for two persons and a shopping bag, or Vicky Verky a three person seat for a single person and a very large shopping bag.
Being a creature of habit I usually target the three person seat with two persons and a space in the middle for a shopping bag, where I ask the resting shopper if he/she would care to move their bag. To show them I am offering the hand of friendship and at the same time proving I have not deliberately targeted them and it is not a personal thing and that I am not looking for a full-on bare knuckle fight outside of Woolworths, I then say “we can pretend we are Magpies sitting on a telephone line”
The victim as my wife calls them usually smile weakly with muted acknowledgement, unaccompanied by words. I accept unconditionally I have intruded onto their private space. That dear reader is my invitation to start a conversation. I can usually tell what a person’s interests are.
My victim today was a lady of foreign extraction. She queried my opening gambit about the Magpies on telephone lines. I asked out of politeness if she could understand English. As it happens she could, remarkably well. It was just as well I resort to erring on the side of caution for I was about to congratulate her on her command of my language but thought better of it.
I then asked if she had studied Quantum Physics. To my utter astonishment she said she hadn’t. That gave me a clear run. I then explained to her that everything we see might not be true reality; I said even the fruit shop opposite was not really there.
I realise for an opener it was a hard ask for her being a personal thing as her husband was still inside the said shop with all their bankcards and stuff with their mobile phone on his person. But I continued.
I briefly touched on SchrÖdinger’s Cat and the Double slit experiment but soon realised I would have to approach this from a completely different direction.
I explained that at least a dozen Ph.D.’s. and at least 4 M.D’s and a brace of theoretical scientists and an unknown number of astrophysicists, astronomers and a lot of other people who are really clever reckon we are living in a Hologram and seeing they have letters after their name and I don’t I must accept what they say as being gospel.
She was a lovely lady and asked me pertinent questions such as did I have the time on me and why wasn’t I shopping with my wife. I explained to her I was resting while my wife was shopping.
I am getting a little beyond myself here. When joining a person on a 3 person seat you will find that one is required to sit as far as possible from the other person as the picture above graphically shows. On taking the centre position on a three person seat it is imperative to always keep in mind when looking left or right that your gaze does not meet your fellow shopping traveller. The trick is to lean as far forward as far as possible and pretend to survey the shopping centre, eyes sweeping left to right or vice versa.
The reason for this will become blindingly apparent. If one were NOT to project their body forward then there is a possibility though slight, that one’s gaze might inadvertently or even accidentally meet the gaze of ones fellow shopper and they might get the impression true or otherwise that you are a sexual pervert or a Homothingy who trawls suburban shopping centres searching for cheap sexual thrills.
It was a new day, a new shopping adventure. This man was a stranger, we had never met before. Again I took the centre position on the bench. I observed the opening pleasantries before putting forward the hypothesis that what we are seeing all originated from the big bang billions of years ago and we are star people, we are ‘OF’ the stars but in our case we are disguised as human beings but in truth we are bolts of pure cosmic energy, just consciousness and living in matrix in a projected fake reality controlled from the other side of the universe, actors in a Hologram with a supposed purpose. I talked of the fabric of space and stuff, oh and multiple universes.
I could tell from his body language his demeanour was beginning to change, he was not going to stay long enough to digest this assertion, he clenched his teeth, turned red in the face tightly closed his eyes, like really tightly like one does when going number twos stood up and left. It was at this point my wife emerged from the fruit shop, arms weighed down with two heavy bags of fruit, shoulders hunched over and arms looking two feet longer than normal not unlike tired Albatross wings or is that Albatross’s wings.
She said “Did your victim flee then?” My wife has a wicked sense of humour.
