Reply To: Stressing out during chaotic situations…advice please!

[allan wallace]

Hmm, interesting. It might seem bizarre, but I generally find myself calm when in the midst of some chaos. It’s almost as if an ‘automatic pilot’ switch is sub-conciously activated and takes over from the erratic and bored pilot…one of my deepest dreads is the ordeal that is going shopping. I loathe it with a passion! Frenzied consumers charging up and down the aisles with their goods laden chariots are as missiles fired at me by Mammon herself! I do not linger, just grab that which is needed, and try and get to the gates of Hell itself as the consumers line up to pay for their perishables….the longer that I’m compelled to wait the higher my blood pressure goes. A few years ago I had what my wife calls a ‘panic attack’. It was Christmas Eve and I’d drawn the short straw to get groceries with my kids as a ‘human shield’ from the Philistines. It was akin to starring in a nightmare. The stampeding herd had amassed outside the supermarket awaiting my arrival with conspiratorial malice. The distinctive clapped out Wallace jalopy was the cue for the Consumerist SWAT team to saturate the aisles and jostle like ravenous swine for the last dregs of the fetid swill that glinted with evil intent at the bottom of the trough. By the time that it had come to park my chariot in the swelling carpark for processing I was as red as a tomato, could scarcely breathe, and had to suppress a yearning to bulldoze every last desperate squealing oinker that was between me and freedom! Aaaaarrrrgggghhhhhhhh

Emancipation was only possible by uttering a short sharp burst of profanities about not being willing to be a bit-player in that seething cauldron of evil and with a symbolic shrug we abandoned the chariot and made our way through the choking weeds that would surely have seen my ignoble demise attributed to cardiac arrest in a hillbilly supermarket on a Christmas Eve, and duly given the epithet as the arsehole that had the selfishness to die on this evening of all evenings just to hold everybody else up just that little bit more as some sort of perverse form of revenge….

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