The evil that follows me...

The moment I left work today I felt like something was watching me.  You know that feeling, where you just know someone or something is right there, looking at you, but you can't see it.  Like being in the jungle, at any second there could be two or a thousand eyes on you.  I shrugged it off, got in my car, and drove across the street to buy some stuff I needed.  As I was walking through the parking lot, I thought I could just see, out of the corner of my eye, a shadow moving between the cars... following me.  I walked into the store and the feeling subsided.  Now it was just the drones of society looking at me, and they were benign at best, pathetic at worst.  The difference between a genius and a mindless drone is simply one of perspective.  And it was this perspective that turned me into everyone else's mindless drone, out buying some stuff.

I found myself in the electronics department on my way to checkout, as I needed a phone card to add minutes to my cell.  I wasn't looking forward to that, though, the last three times I had tried to add minutes from a prepaid card failed and I was forced to spend around an hour and a half each time on the phone with some guy in Pakistan to get it worked out.  I was beginning to believe that for every minute I wanted on my cell, I had to spend one minute on hold while my friend Ranjeek entered more information, thank you sir, please hold...  As I was walking out of the electronics area, I saw that I was going to pass by the customer service counter.  An overwhelming rage overtook me at that moment, and I felt like I was watching myself from a third person point of view.  I felt the "watched" sensation that I had experienced outside again, full force.  Only this time, it was me watching.  I walked up to the clerk at the customer service counter, carefully placed my phone card on the counter, turned it around so it faced the him, and slid it forward.  Like a striking snake, I grabbed him by the collar with my left hand and slapped him in the side of the head twice with the package of thick-sliced bacon I had been holding behind my back in my right and screamed "Is this going to work, you filthy swine?"  He tried to lurch backward but I had him, and he fell sideways trying to tear my grip loose.  "Swine!  You mother-raping bastard, do you know someone named Ranjeek?  Answer me!"  I raised the bacon again, and stared deeply into the terrified clerk's soul.  It was actually the quiet that warned me that I was drawing a crowd.  The sight of a man being publicly beaten with bacon is something that many people simply cannot handle.  I lifted the clerk up off his knees from his attempts to grovel out of my grasp and brought him up to meet me, eyeball to eyeball.  "If this doesn't work, I'll be back."  "Wh-why w-wouldn't it work, sir?"  The clerk seemed genuinely confused, so I thought I should take a more reasonable track with him.  "Do you want me to go through that, right here in front of the Tracfone aisle, in front of all these people?"  I screamed... raising the bacon again.  He said nothing.  I let him go and he slumped to the floor, frozen in terror.  I held his petrified gaze as I pushed my cart through the rabble of onlookers I had attracted.  I could tell that he'd never be the same.  There was something in his eyes that said he'd been changed forever, and he'd never enjoy bacon ever again.

To be continued...