A tiny piece of fiction inspired by a brief real-life feeling and all the David Sedaris I’ve been reading lately:

Although the rational, date-keeping part of my brain must have known, the rest of me had almost totally managed to not realize what time of year it was. It’s not hard to do when you live largely in one of those parallel subcultures apart from “mainstream” America; it’s like I was one of those fresh-faced Evangelical teens, only instead of wholesome “Jesus is My Boyfriend” pop music, treacly films that continue to keep Kirk Cameron in banana money, and a total trust a glorious afterlife, I have national public radio, indie film, and comfortably questioning agnosticism to keep me warm at night.

Sure, it leads to my making oblique references to This American Life in casual conversation with co-workers that go completely over everyone else’s head, but I consider the occasional social faux-pas a fair trade for the near total lack of commercial breaks interrupting my life.

However, the very lack of those commercials prevented me from anticipating conditions on the ground as I approached the doorway to the local grocery store to buy a bag of apples and a loaf of bread.

I heard the ringing bell, and momentarily froze with anxiety and fear.

I braced myself behind the armor of my “You read my t-shirt, that’s enough social interaction for one day” t-shirt, and pressed on, walking briskly, hands in pockets with a determined look, fixed on something, anything twenty yards behind the bucket and ringing bell, intent on avoiding eye contact with the ringer in the red and green smock.

Now, I’m not against charitable giving; quite the contrary (the stacks of solicitation mailings I receive from environmental and equal rights organizations are a testiment to how many mailing lists I’ve gotten on by writing checks to the Sierra Club and Amnesty International). It’s just that I find it sort of meaningless when society only seems to enforce the impulse to help a brotha out for six weeks a year, and insists on doing it while also wearing a jaunty Santa cap and glaring at anyone not wearing a cheery holiday grin and humming Rudolph the Red-Nosed Frakking Reindeer.

Mostly though, it’s the fact that I’m such an introvert that I hate having the extra interaction with strangers asking for spare change in front of the supermarket door. And really, it’s not just this time of year. I try not to go out on Memorial Day weekend because the firemen and their empty boots have all the parking lots staked out.

I push forward, keeping my steely glare into middle distance and maintaining my rapid pace while effortlessly dodging a woman juggling a wayward grocery cart. I’m nearly there, it’s as if I can feel myself brushing the invisible frontier of the motion detector, which, when crossed, will open the sliding doors and offer me admission to the bounty of the produce department.

Suddenly – SMACK! The world goes momentarily black, and I find myself on the cool concrete. It seems that in my laser-like focus on my goal to avoid the holiday panhandlers, I managed to not notice the electric scooter being carelessly driven against the right-of-way by an overweight elderly woman in a gaudy holiday sweater that managed to collide with the back of my knee.

As I begin to regain my bearings, I notice that I wasn’t the only casualty; the driver’s carelessness has managed to knock over a row of dry, crumbling cut Christmas trees stacked to one side of the store entrance, which startles a small child into gawping sobs, drawing everyone’s attention, including the bell ringer.

Recognizing a diversion when I saw it, I quickly right myself and dart stealthily into the store to retrieve my needed supplies, and merely have to contend with piped in-pop Christmas carols, which I can usually manage to ignore.

As I approach the till, items in hand, I silently give thanks for the invention of automated self check-out lanes and their proximity to the largely unused secondary door near the pharmacy, which I notice, perhaps belatedly, is ringer-free. I’ve had quite enough of the holiday cheer of human contact already.

Yeah, feeling bah humbuggy today. Deal with it.