For the first time ever in my life, I have witnessed the glory of a man purse. A young black man came up to my register. I, being disgruntled, grunted (or is that "dis-grunted") what was meant to be a greeting and simply kept my head down, scanning each item with furious speed, flinging it towards the wide-eyed bag boy with such dexterity that cripples and parapalegics everywhere suddenly all began to cry in jealousy.

Finally, after I threw the last item across the scanner, I looked up, belching out the total. The young man nodded, and pulled up some sort of bag. I eyed it warily, knowing that bags were horrible nuisances and hating them with intesity after having worked around them for years, and soon my hatred dissolved into inner laughter as I realized that I was looking at a man purse. It was not a tote bag, or some other sort of bag--this could only be described as a man purse.

While I'm stifling giggles, he attempts to pay with his food stamp card. Naturally, he doesn't have a balance. He probably spent all of his money on man purses. And who can blame him? It was a fine man purse.

I point out to him that the annoying sound my computer just made signaled the rejection of his food stamp card. His response was to say, "Oh, let me get my other EBT card."

Now, maybe it's just me, but I always thought the government wouldn't be stupid enough to give ONE person TWO food stamp cards. I mean, if I were running things, that'd probably be a rule or something. Perhaps they made an exception for this man--he had a man purse, after all.

Of course, instead of pulling out a second EBT card, instead he pulls out several huge piles of receipts. He must have had a life's worth of receipts in his man purse. Soon I could no longer see anything as I was buried beneath the receipts from his bottomless man purse. And no EBT card to be found.

I felt saddened, but I was forced to tell the man-purse man to get the fuck out of the store and to leave his groceries with me. So he collected his abundant receipts, stuffed them back into his man purse, and waddled away dejectedly. He was a terrible nuisance, and he wasted so much time that all the customers behind him were now scowling and speaking tersely and angrily as if the man purse fiasco had been of my devising--but I could not bring myself to hate the man purse man as much as the others did. Sure, he was cheating the government, he couldn't afford his groceries, and he had somehow collected every receipt he had ever received--but his man purse made up for it all. In retrospect, I am sort of thankful that he did not have any money. It just would have been another receipt added to the collection. I slyly would have purposely "forgotten" to give him his receipt, just out of pity. I, too, can understand the plight of receipt-collecting. My wallet bulges with the five-year old receipts I still have saved. Will I, too, be forced to buy a man purse? Will my receipt clinginess damn me to man-pursedom? Only time will tell.

My girlfriend (known here as the illustrious his_hamstress) is no doubt going to write a lengthy post about how I girlishly stepped upon a piece of her dog's poo while gallavanting around the house in the nude. She will write, in excruciating detail, about how my miniscule schlong dangled ferociously as I danced around the room, in search of the poo that I had been informed lay encrusted on the floor. She will detail how I emitted a piercing, bat-like shriek that caused an uproarious howling from the neighborhood's collective dogs, and how I subsequently ran to the bathroom like a frightened gazelle with a wounded hoof, submerging my whole body into the bathtub and rolling around as if I were cleansing myself in some sort of ecstatic religious ritual.

All of this is a viscious lie perpetrated to ruin my good name. What actually happened is that I was walking, quite bow-legged and masculine I might add, around the house in a way that did not resemble prancing at all. I was not nude, as she will indicate, but instead wearing whatever it is that masculine men wear, which is probably some sort of combination of sleeveless flannel, a construction hat, and low-hanging jeans. And when I stepped in the poo, I did not squeal like a little girl, but rather growled angrily and smote the poo into dust as if I were some vengeful tribal deity.

Okay, okay. I'm lying. I'm a little girl around poo. And somehow, some way, my foot finds a way to immerse itself in dog shit whenver it can be found upon the ground. When Lissa had remarked that she had found this particular poo today, for instance, my first remark was a surprised, "I can't believe I didn't step in it first!" As I came out to pick it up, I spotted it near my dresser. As I crept towards it, I felt something awful squish beneath my feet. In my enthusiasm for finally picking up a piece of crap without having first stepped in it, I had failed to notice the turd-mine that Squirt had carefully hidden within the folds of the carpet. The bastard had foiled me. Some people are color blind. Me, I'm incapable of seeing poo. I live in a world of my own mental-construction, and it just so happens to be a world that does not contain any poo at all. Consequently, my foot lands in the poo every single time.