Sun Trine Chiron

Now I think this was supposed to give me the chance to bring painful events from the past to light and deal with them in a different - more healed (?) - way, but I have no memory whatsoever of shopping in Walmart as a child, let alone using the self-service checkout.

I have plenty of recent memories of Walmart, all of which tell me if I don't get there by 9:30 am at the very latest I should put off going till the next day, but needs must when the devil drives (a phrase I have never understood but seems particularly appropriate here) so there I was on Monday afternoon at three pm waiting for a self-service checkout to become available (!!!) and reminding myself over and over that I had made a conscious decision to buy groceries at just this time and there was no point whatsoever in having a temper tantrum and I should just get over myself.

Truly amazingly - as I have weaned myself off of all medication and am no longer taking either Celexa or Wellbutrin - I was able to hold on to this feeling when I punched in the code for green grapes, saw the cost come up on the screen, bought them - as I thought - and then saw the dreaded "Unexpected Item in Bagging Area - Assistance Needed" appear, while the red light began flashing and the screen froze.

The person responsible for giving assistance was probably on his first unsupervised day at work and I counted to 200 before giving up while he stabbed away at the screen in a valiant attempt to sort it all out, somewhat along  the lines of a chimpanzee writing Macbeth if you wait long enough, and when he finally made his way to When shall we three meet again? I was able to go back to my self-checking out.

Blackberries, Whiskas, PowerAde, Clamato Juice, Fat-Free Half-and-half  - all was whizzing along merrily until - oh horrors - the basket was almost empty and, with sinking heart, I realized I'd grabbed two cans of white satin spray paint for sprucing up the outside wicker chairs and may as well have grabbed a couple of gallons of vodka.

(Perhaps more (less?) enlightened states don't have this law, although for all I know, NM being the only state in which I ever buy spray paint, it's federal, but whatever it is, no one's allowed to buy spray paint here any more unless they're over 18, something a self-check-out counter is incapable of determining.)

This, perhaps, is where Sun trine Chiron kicks in, at least the "It can also prevent you from hurting others" bit,  for Mr. Assistance Needed was knee-deep in unmarked kids' clothes merchandise at an adjacent register attempting to write The Merchant of Venice and somehow I had the forbearance to wait until he got to The Quality of Mercy is not Strained and was able to verify I'm 50 years over the legal age to be allowed to buy spray paint without interrupting him and pointing out perhaps he needed to go back to associate training school and learn how to troubleshoot. The end.