Getting Down

Sometimes pleasure comes from the most unexpected quarters.

I called via Coles in the Myer Centre after work today. It wasn't an entirely deliberate act, but one in a series of almost random choices I'd made since ambling despondently out of the office mid-afternoon. Frustration and a vague, unfocused depression had daubed my day grey, so shouldering my way into that ants' nest of irritable grocery-seekers was a decision tinged with more than a little masochism, the kind of willfully perverse punishment I flay myself with when I'm in this dark frame of mind.

But life is not remotely predictable, and sometimes gives a laugh and a tickle just when a slap in the chops is expected.

Thud-unk, thwak! Thud-unk, thwak! Thud-unk, thwak! Thud-unk, thwak! All around me shoppers, who seconds before had been gnashing their teeth over which boutique brand of organic haloumi to buy, or screeching instructions into their phones relaxed, closed their eyes and began grooving and wiggling their bums to Stevie Wonder's Superstition which now seeped its soothing salve across the store. I kid you not: the shoulders of everyone within my sight dropped and their faces smoothed out of the knotty tension of before. B'DOW-dow-DOW-doooow! was all it took to slide the mood dial around from gratin' to groovin', from bitchy to bitchin'; smiles replaced snarls, and all thanks to some anonymous employee's choice of tunes. And then, to my utter, utter delight someone said, "Holy guacamole!" Alright!

Indeed...the most unexpected quarters.