Surreal Publix Trip

Saturday night, Candace and I took what normally would have been an uneventful trip to her local Publix Supermarket had it not been for a certain presumably crazy/homeless man we encountered. While looking at cereals, this fully-grown adult male who kinda resembled Allen Ginsberg came whizzing by with his shopping cart making what sounded like a racing car noise. When he first passed, we thought it was pretty ridiculous, but we had no idea he was going to come back in a minute or two.

The second time he whizzed by, Candace made a comment outloud (but more to herself), something like "what in the world?!?," after which the man stopped in his tracks, turned around, and started walking towards us, leaving his cart behind. He started talking to us, but he was either so crazy he couldn't speak or he was literally mute, only able to get a couple garbled sounds out resembling speech. So instead he stood next to me and started writing something down on a little sheet of paper he had with him. This made both of us rather uncomfortable, so Candace urged me to just go. I kinda wanted to see what he was writing down though, and I was kinda afraid walking away would only provoke him more, so we waited.

What he wrote was something along the lines of "I don't like other bad people." We weren't really sure what this meant and whether or not we qualified as "bad people" (for laughing at him), but this made me want to get out of there even more. So we rushed to the checkout counter, after which he made his way to the service desk, yelling incoherently and pointing towards someone else in the store, evidently angry that he had been mistreated. Eventually the store called a security officer in, but this only made me want to get out of there quicker, as he might end up leaving at the same time as us and be able to harass us unchecked outside.

Fortunately, we didn't see him again, but this whole sequence of events certainly shook both of us up. I sometimes quasi-jokingly criticize Publix for going out of their way to hire mentally-handicapped people, but this was something else entirely...