Shameville

The road to Shameville runs thusly.


Show up late to the grocery run that the assistant company manager has so helpfully organized in order to keep everyone from being reduced to eating each other.

Subsequently make the abovementioned ACM do a second grocery + Kmart trip just for you, because you have literally no food for the week and no hangers or bedding in your room.

Feel bad about yourself.

Get lost in the grocery store.

Accidentally cuss in front of angelic child.

Feel worse about yourself.

Fail to read own handwriting on grocery list (composed in the train, on the "Bone-Rattle Road" section of the route). Guess in haphazard fashion.

Spend much too long in grocery store, causing ACM to text your dying phone, "Do you need help?" You will not receive this text until the following day, due to phone death.

Realize after scanning through all haphazard items that you do not have enough money on you currently to pay for food, much less anything from Kmart.

Feed every last individual coin in your wallet into the checkout machine, in a last desperate bid to not overdraft on your account.

Hold up three other people in the line, who are no doubt beginning to wonder whether you left your food stamps at home.

Feel pretty darn bad, on the whole.

Call over terribly nice grocery store man to help you remove items from your checkout, because you can't afford them. Be as flustered and mortified as humanly possible. Forget to remove two items in the process, thus overdrafting after all.

Collect haphazard grocery items. Flee.

Do not pass Go, do not collect $200, do not go to Kmart. Go home, put on sweatpants, tell the world about it.

The end.


(there will be a much cheerier New York post to follow, I promise.)