Hello Out There?

It's fall. Goodbye humidity, goodbye warmness. Hello chapped lips and wet leaves blowing into my face. So where do they sell chapstick these days? Target (for only 99 cents), and gas stations (for $2.17). Ridiculous. I live about twenty minutes from the closest Target, and on my daily commute I'm not much closer to it. I'm thrifty...sometimes.

I've been waiting for about five days to get down to Target with a list larger than "chapstick" but I don't really do much shopping there. On my way home I watched a particularly large chunk of flesh fall off my lip and land with a thud on my leg. I got fed-up and pulled into the BP parking-lot at forty miles-per-hour. I grumbled to myself as I stalked into the convience store. The cheery metal bell on the door made my ears bleed and I found the aisle which contained fingernail clippers, tylenol, cough syrup, and those tiny tubes of deodorant which last two hours. I call it the Medical Aisle. I stood in the Medical Aisle for about five minutes. I mistook batteries for chapstick four times. The lady at the counter watched me reach for the batteries a fifth time and then snatch my hand back.

'I'm not trying to steal these...I swear, Lady.' I wiped my nose and sucked some blood off my lip and walked up to the counter.

"Do you have chapstick?" I asked the gas station lady.

"Yes," she said.

"...Where is it?" I asked. 'Watch out Gas Station Lady, I am a Vampire, see the blood on my lip? Vampires need chapstick too...'

"I have it behind the counter here," 'Back with the cigs and chew and other stuff you need to be 18 or older to buy, obviously,' she said with a Vanna White gesture to her right. "Would you like to buy Original or Cherry?"

"The black one, please," 'That's the one with the illegal drugs, right?' I said. Suck, suck, suck.

"That will be two dollars and seventeen cents," 'I need to see some ID for this.'

I paid with a debit card.