Today I have to go to the supermarket and perform the last of the shopping “rituals” for Christmas and New Year's Eve. For decades, humanity has been going crazy. Bipeds buy pointless stuff, like fish drink water during this period. Why do they do this? I do not know. For many of them, the religious component of the X-mas holiday means nothing anymore. They have no idea about the birth of Jay-C, or the Resurrection of the Whatshisface, mistaking the stable scene for another advertisement product placement. “Buy now and get 3 mages for free - with additional gifts in the package! (Donkeys not included).” For them, these are only calendar dates in which they do not go to work, a time when they stay at home, drink, eat, (Beep) and rest. The other stuff doesn't matter anymore. Religion has long ceased to count for anything in the bipedal life, which might not be that bad of a thing in the end. Humanity has fundamentally drifted away from religion during the last century, mostly because of science. I mean, when you begin to study Math and Physics, the odds of a jolly old man God with a long beard sitting up in the sky and watching you masturbate with disapproving eyes suddenly becomes ridiculous, but I am not the right person to judge anyone’s beliefs. Today, Christmas and Easter have become purely commercial holidays, a great opportunity for the big supermarket chains to make big bucks. And bipeds are the most excited. You will say that humanity has “upgraded”. Here you are perfectly right, because nothing is how it was, or in the way that it was before. Everything has changed and is still changing with great speed, but not necessarily for the better in the long run.

I left the two furries in their baskets. They were exhausted after so many fights. Obelix had come to our home before the great “alpinist” Othello. From here sprang the struggle for territory and for supremacy between the two pe(s)ts. Like all dogs, Obelix is an idiot and a beggar of a dog. My daughter had made a bad choice when she had brought him to the apartment. He is by no means a smart critter. In fact, French bulldogs do not overflow with intelligence in general. They are funny, but stupid. The arrival of the “enemy” Othello had put him in great difficulty. He had lost the sole right to the armchairs, sofas and beds in the apartment. Othello, as a self respecting tomcat, put the barker in his place from the very beginning. With two well-aimed paws, he had executed the pooch from day one, scratching him to blood. Like all cats, Othello has a very well developed sense of ownership. The French barker is not being paid much attention to. It is below the dignity of his “proper stray cat ancestry” to cohabit with a trembling, barking jelly, but he makes do. The fight for existence and especially for the “pole position”, is fierce in the furries world too.

I finally got to the supermarket. I just couldn't find a shopping cart. The supermarket has become a new kind of Holy Pilgrimage Site for the Christians, where all the savings of the bipeds are buried. Every day thousands of bipeds come to “worship” at these establishments. They all sing praise and offer financial sacrifices to the gods of commerce. Hermes has become more revered today than Jay-C. But not to forget, Hermes was also considered in Greek mythology as the god of thieves. May I deduce from this that bipeds that run these places are a bunch of scoundrels? Sure, but that's another discussion.

A lot of bipeds almost step over eachother. They rashly buy everything and throw all of the products in their baskets. It looks like it’s the end of the world. It’s as if the planet will disappear during the next few days. The bipeds seem to have gone crazy. They have no sense of measure. This situation is yet another proof of the rapid “evolution” of the human species. They buy a lot of useless stuff, and after the holidays they throw it in the garbage bins without measure or thought. It seems that the supermarket has become a “horn of abundance” powered by credit cards. After so many centuries of famine and epidemics, the beginning of the third millennium has become a symbol of waste. A few years of hunger and drought would teach civilization not to waste so much anymore. However, it seems that the vast majority of bipeds do not grasp the concept of “wasting resources”. And even those that do get it, care too little about it.

Fifty years ago, during my childhood, I had never dreamed that a thing like the supermarket could even exist. I had lived until I was almost seven years old in my grandparents' house. My parents, both teachers, came to see me once a week during Saturday and Sunday. Only during summer did we go together to the sea or the mountainside. For almost seven years, I was the only grandson in the grandparents' house. At the age of five, I was stealing eggs from the hens' nest and going with my two older cousins to the village shop, where in exchange for the eggs I received ice cream, candies or chocolate. The seller didn't necessarily need the money. The eggs were “strong currency” back then. No one then knew about the “daily exchange rate”, the “stock market quotations of oil and the various metals” so essential to humanity. I had endured the worst period of communism. And yet, for us children, life seemed beautiful. How many times had Rex, the dog of the household, taken a punishment for being the main suspect for the disappearance of the eggs? I had been careful to break an egg in his cot so that he could take the blame for it. One day, the trick didn't work anymore. My grandfather found us dead drunk, myself and my older cousins, in front of the village shop. I had stolen fifteen eggs, and in exchange for them, my older cousins had received from the seller a half-a-liter bottle of chocolate liqueur. It was so sweet and good that I had no idea when we got drunk. I just know that I woke up the next day with a severe headache. Grandpa, in order to scare me, threatened to cut my hand off with the wood axe if he caught me stealing eggs again. Anyway, my aunt, my mother's sister, was now watching me like a hawk. So goodbye ice cream, candy and chocolate. And so my “honest customer” experience of the village shop ended. At that time I did not even dream of the notion of a supermarket or a mall.

Now, I have a hard time walking among the bipeds during the shopping fever. In front of me, four young people take four chocolates from a shelf. They break them down tactically and start eating them. I watch in amazement how after two minutes, one of the younger folks throws inside a garbage can the wrapping of the chocolates already eaten. After that, without being disturbed by anyone, he “pours” two handfuls of almond kernels into one of the pockets of his coat. This is plain daylight robbery! A veritable heist I say! Those almonds were veritable gold! Although several pairs of eyes had seen the bipedal juniors as they threw away the wrappings of the chocolates and filled their pockets with almond kernels, no one said anything. It was the “holy” solidarity of the powerless bipedal buyers, in the face of the scams perpetuated for years by the supermarkets. It's actually the most handy way for the bipedal buyers to take revenge on the greed of the supermarkets. And you may say, that for how big the conglomerates that own these supermarkets are, two handfuls of almond kernels and a few chocolates won’t damage the turnover of a supermarket that much, right? Here you may be right. It is the same as in the old logical paradox of the ancient Greeks. You take a grain of wheat from a pile of wheat, and a whole bunch of wheat grains will still remain in the pile. We are on the other hand, looking at the “ancestral solidarity” of the buyers in front of the greed and thievery of the merchants. What do those who do not have enough guts to pig themselves off the shelves most likely say to the gesture of eating unpaid chocolate and almonds from the supermarket? “If I can't do that, at least these other dudes will do it and teach these crooked traders a thing or two!”. But if even a tenth of the buyers would eat and drink “for free” at the supermarket, the merchants would go bankrupt. Or they would improve their surveillance systems and give the delinquent customers to the police in a much harsher way. Although I doubt that in the third millennium, there’s any merciless judge who would toss the bipeds into “the cooler” for a bite of chocolate. There remains only a “guerrilla warfare” of the shoplifting bipeds against the greed of modern merchants. I bet that the absence of said chocolates and almond kernels from the sales inventory at the end will just get labeled from the supermarket as perishables. Still, I did not condone nor accept their behavior, since it was just a plain mindless “redneck rampage”, they did not even bother to do it stealthily.

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I managed to put everything that had been desired by my mother-in-law from my list, aka “big mama” as my daughter calls her, after only a couple of minutes. It was not a big deal, since everything was at the reach of a hand, but considering that I had a cart full of things for the holidays, everything I bought now cost a little extra. Like all “respectable” older bipeds, even “big mama” was no exception to the splurging mentality during the holidays. It was not enough for her, what had already already been stashed away in the pantry. I do understand her though. When you are almost eighty years old and do not know if you are going to make it to your next Christmas, it is understandable not to hold back. Finally, after almost an hour, I left the supermarket but not before picking a few goodies for the two furries as well. The greedy Obelix always eats the food from sweet Othello’s bowl. I hope he won’t start to meow from all of that cat food he ate so far.

The visit to the supermarket had proved to me once again that bipeds became irrational given the context to manifest so. That is, if they had ever been rational to begin with, and not some socially-constructed and directed automatons. The vast majority of them live only to eat and drink, and not the other way around, eat and drink to live for another day like the rest of the animals. The current consumer society is the main culprit for the existence of the supermarkets and malls. Beginning with the fifties of the twentieth century, all of the neighborhood shops gradually disappeared. In their place, the first supermarkets had appeared. Everything had been done with the idea of saving time and money. In these new “cornucopias” you could buy faster and cheaper. The quality of the goods did not matter anymore. Everything was just a great illusion, because in front of such an offer which no neighborhood individual shop could afford to counter, the Yankee, British, German, French or Italian client could not resist. They were coming to buy only eggs, but somehow they would wake up in front of the cash register full of vegetables, candy, juices or other wonders in the shopping basket. And instead of paying a dollar, a pound, a franc or a brand, they were paying the wrong extra amount. In their naivety, the bipeds considered the idea as a “masterpiece of commerce”. By that time, almost half of the purchases made were being thrown away after a week, because they had expired or had rotted away. You couldn't eat like an elephant, even though the bipeds had already invented the fridge and freezer to prolong the agony of the poor vegetables for a while longer, before getting sacrificed to the altar of the soup gods. From hunters, shepherds and farmers, bipeds have only become consumers. Steadily, the supermarket network spread all across North America and Western Europe. Even the stern Germans had finally abdicated in front of this new version of the “horn of abundance”. Since then, generations of bipeds have become the slaves of the supermarket networks. Not to mention about the days when certain products, often unnecessary, have a discount! You will laugh with tears as you will see dozens of Eastern European bipeds standing in line for hours at an end, just for three low-priced pans, while smashing and beating eachother to reach one place further in the waiting queue. Even though they already have at home, each one of them, at least five or six different other pans. But I could somehow understand these Eastern European bipeds. After more than seven decades of communism, they were just like the Russians themselves. They may have only seen Western supermarkets on television until the fall of communism in the 1990s. That's why they have an excuse, they had been traumatised in their infancy by the lack of “everything” that the communist regime had brought on. But the bipeds in the “civilized” parts of Europe and North America have no excuse for their imbecility.

Little by little, supermarkets have become part of the urban landscape of the civilized world. Neighborhood shops, boots, tailoring, ladies' stocking workshops, dressers, as well as other workshops very useful for bipeds, have all disappeared. No more than fifty years after the first supermarkets appeared, the first malls appeared on the ground. And this is also due to the “evolution” of the human species. The malls are nothing more than a concentration of shops similar to a small town. Here you can buy pretty much everything you need, usually just useless things that you DON’T actually need but still look pretty, and you can also eat lunch or dinner at a fast food restaurant or watch a movie at a modern cinema. That's because, along with the neighborhood shops, the neighborhood or drive-in cinemas have all disappeared in the meantime. The nowadays biped, poor or rich, spends half the weekend again with his wife, children, puppy, hamster and parrot and whatever other pe(s)t critter, all touring the mall. He forgot how to hunt, fish, grow animals for eating, nor can he farm even a beanstalk to save his own life if he had to. But he has “evolved”, they say, when you can buy everything ready. Shoes, shirts, socks, refrigerators, TVs, washing machines, irons, they are all no longer repaired. They are used for as long as they are in the warranty period (which is in fact a general guideline for how long that product will last before breaking) and then they are thrown away. If such products lasted for more than a few years and were easy to repair, then millions of Chinese would have died of hunger, because they would no longer have to produce new ones on a constant basis. And look at how the big corporations line their pockets with money made on the backs of the poor and abused little asian workers. And the malls and supermarkets are thriving as a result.

During the Christmas and Easter holidays, the supermarkets and malls are crowded more than ever. Traditions have been lost and all the bipeds roam these commercial establishments, symbols of the civilization of the third millennium, without goal or purpose, attracted to the colorful displays of the shelves like moths to a flame. No one makes homemade sardines, beef, steak or cake. The “respectable” biped nowadays just buys these products, whose preparation in our grandparents' homes had so much delighted our childhood period. All current culinary preparations taste like rubber, cement or rust, but it doesn't matter anymore. The world has changed, “welcome to the age of food-in-a-tube”. Those nearing the sixty years of age like myself have become “vicious and outdated old fossils” that refuse to “get on with the times”. Many of us are forced to go to the supermarket or mall out of necessity or inertia. It seems that our world is gradually changing, but I highly doubt it is in a positive way.