Wading in the Velvet Sea

It didn’t take me long to find it. Not really sure how I could have missed it. Been in front of me for years. The most obvious training ground to test and survey potential assassins, government operatives, and spies in the country. And there are tens of thousands of them in this nation of ours. They are encroaching as we speak. And you all go to them every week.

What I am talking about?

Supermarkets.

That’s right. In the Boston area we have Stop n Shop, Shaw’s, Star Market. (SSS? A coincidence? Oh don’t you believe it for an instant.) I’m sure you have your own versions where you live. I’m not talking your Mom and Pop shop, your White Hens, or the ilk. I’m talking about stores that have aisles dedicated entirely to dogfood. To hair products. Stores that are specifically designed to be a training ground for the deadliest military personnel divisible.

Don’t believe me? Let’s look at what supermarkets test:

1) Navigational Skills: There’s actually a reason why shopping carts have a broken wheel and only barely fit side by side in any given aisle. It’s not simle mechanical incompetence, oh no. American culture dictates that we simply accept that things don’t work the way they should (cf, computers that crash daily, cell phones that go in and out of service). By contrast, a cart that has a seeming kamikaze death wish towards the row of Ronzoni products doesn’t really faze us. Cameras that we can’t see are monitoring the aisles, checking to look for the diamond in the rough that can navigate past the old woman who feels the need to check every can of Ragu even though the all have the same price, the Commie-vegan 20-something couple who take up almost the entire row between their green-khakied selves and the cart of tofu burgers, and mother of three whose offspring are clinging to the cart like Kate Winslet at the end of ‘Titanic’. This also leads into the next category:

2) Telepathy: It’s a well-kept secret that telepathy is a trained skill within the military. It can’t be taught, mind you, but it can be honed. Special X-ray/infrared scanners monitor mental impulses, checking for abnormal activity between minds. This data is fed into a computer to reproduce the thought processes in common speech. Some examples include:

‘Move bitch or this cart goes straight up your ass and out of your nose’’

‘If you so much as try to get the deli man’s attention and pretend you were here before me, so help me God I’ll remove any trace of your participation in the race known as Homo sapiens.’
And so forth.

These thoughts are measured by how effective the telepathy is. If the person at 45 degrees suddenly decided that they need eggs all of a sudden, and move before the telepather reaches them, well, that’s 5 points. There’s a 45 point minimum to be put on The List. I could tell you what The List is, but then I’d have to kill you.

Telepathy is often mistaken for mental acuity. But how is one really supposed to find items like marshmallow fluff? No aisle description ever alerts you where to find pickles. The US government spent 30 years finding fringe food elements and then placing them in utterly illogical places within the supermarket. Our telepathers alone can find these items without asking an employee. The retinal scanning chip on each employee's name tag quickly identifies those who ask the location of an item and are quickly discarded from the central database in Newark. Why Newark? Have you ever BEEN to Newark? Exactly. Moving on...

‘Now wait,’ you’re saying, ‘There’s no such thing as telepathy. I’ve never seen someone’s face matching the vehemence of the statements made above. And hey, I want my lunch money back. Hey, no…no wedgies! HEY!’

Anyways, sorry about him. As I was ABOUT to say, before being so rudely interrupted, there are hardly any outward signs of such aggression. It’s all kept internal. And that, my friends, leads into the third and most important factor in military recruitment:

3) Patience: One must have the zen of Siddhartha himself to truly qualify for recruitment. Look at all the military throws at the typical supermarket customer: a parking lot designed by a blind midget, aisles the width of J Lo’s ass, and just enough employees to have check-out lines moving, but at the pace of William Perry running the Boston Marathon. When a ‘potential’ is identified (the military loves using adjectives as nouns, don’t ask me why; again, the whole ‘I will kill you’ thing comes into play), the military takes great strides to instruct the cashier to be extra slow, or use a mole to write a check in the ‘4 or less’ aisle. These tests of will are designed to ensure that operatives will not crack under duress. Now, operatives are only human, and may indeed wish to give the cashier a basic lesson in addition and subtraction, or find the upper management person who thought it a grand idea to place sophisticated technology in the hands of people who can’t pass the MCAS, but this Buddha-esque potential cannot lose his outward cool. Instead, he/she pretends to read ‘Soap Opera Weekly’ while the scanner adamantly refuses to scan the one microwave pizza without a sales tag in the entire store.

OK, my handler is telling me that the government is about to intercept this missive, so I should sign off. Just remember:

Canned yams.

You’ll know soon enough.