My feelings on Wal-mart

Wal-Mart:

Destroyer of worlds

And

Mother of Trailer parks

I don’t think that there was any one point in my life that I found that I was irrevocably different from what I had been before. No one moment in my existence that changed me. No grand epiphany, no heavenly choir from above, no lighting bolt out of the blue. Not even a mental slap in the face telling me “Everything you know is wrong, stupid!” Out of all the things I believed when I was a child, the only glaring inconsistency was the death of my faith in the intelligence of my species, all thanks to that monument to the greenback, Wal-Mart.

Originally, I thought that most people were individuals that could take care of themselves; beings smart and able bodied enough that (given the right kind of stimulus, i.e.: a swift kick in the rear) could turn this crazy, twisted world in to a paradise, a neo-Eden if you will. All this was before the gods of capitalism decreed that a new Super Wal-Mart store was to be built no far enough from my house. At first, I was naïve, my thinking being “Hey, now I wont have to travel so far to get comics and munchies,” comics and munchies being the only things I cared about at the time, never suspecting what horrors would soon be unleashed. The months passed like ice melting under an Arizona sun. I watched giant palace to consumerism being built; the process reminding me of decomposition, though in a kind of surreal rewind: Massive steel bones rising from the dust, being fixed in place by tendons and ligaments of earth and stone, nerves or wire and veins of pipe spreading out in spider webs from all corners, and finally a skin of brick, mortar, and paint forming to protect the vitals that would one day lie inside. Little did I realize that this False Adam I had worshiped so long would one day become my most despised and hated enemy.

The day of the grand opening came and went, the birth pangs surprisingly light, and I basked in the glow of an Indian summer. Life was the sliver lining on which I lived, unknowing and uncaring of the sinister turbulence of the thunderhead that lay inside its thin and waning brilliance. But, even if I had known, there was nothing that could be done. The disease had established itself, and its time of dormancy was near its end.

First, trailer parks sprouted up around the Wal-Mart, then moved out in an ever widening perimeter, eventually being stopped by farmland less then two miles from my doorstep. The parks moved in like a plague: infecting good, perfectly usable plots of land, filling it with sloth, vileness, and degradation until the land is black with corruption, then moving out in all points of the compass like cancer.

Then came the car accidents. Teens from a local high school near the Wal-Mart and the festering wastes occupied by the spreading trailer parks were locked in a titanic battle with irate obese pig-women with sixteen screaming kids in the back seat of their Chevy suburbans. These pig-women always seemed to be running late, which I judge by the fact that they’re driving at speeds that would make NASCAR driver ill. But, WHAT could they be going to? Some sort of blue light sale? Or some thing much more sinister?

Finally, the straw that broke the camels back so to speak, was the gradual retarding of the intelligence of all those who even came into proximity of the Wal-Mart. The conversations I over heard while in the Wal-Mart were so vapid and inane, that I feared some sort of chemical nerve agent had been released. Of course, that was when I could hear anything at all, over the siren like blaring from the endless legions of crying babies. I once had insomnia and at Three o’clock in the morning, decided to go to Wal-Mart, then was physically pushed back out the door by the sheer power of the hell spawned children that were even at that hour, residing in the store. This is one of the more common conversations I could here once the ringing sound finally ceased.

Pig-woman, sounding like a drunk, hoarse, Catherine Hepburn from “On Golden Pond”: Sir, do you know where the little thingies with doohickeys are?

Clerk, sounding like Keanu Reeves, in any movie he’s ever been in: Uh, wuh?

After hearing this, I began to feel sick, on the verge of throwing up. I tried to make it to the pharmacy, where the blood pressure machine was, so I could sit down, when a blood vessel, unable to coup with utter idiocy for the whole situation, closed off to keep my brain from committing seppuku, sending me crashing to the floor, unconscious. I floated in a deep miasma for what seemed like forever. All was gray and silent. Then, from an impossibly distant corner of that world came a voice. “Chill,” it said to me, “you’re to stressed. You got to learn to relax.”

I awakened from my state to find a pimply worker drone standing over me. My near death had drawn a lot of attention, it seemed, though my miraculous recovery from death had surly dashed the hopes of the dozen or so women named Maurine to show up on the morning news programs. I brought my hands to my face and felt a sticky film coating my lower jaw. It turned out to be my own blood, a nosebleed that had gone from creek to Niagara in a matter of seconds, however the flow did seem to be stopping on its own. As I got my baring, I noticed a pool of blood behind my head (it turned out I landed face first and that the blood was also from the rivulets that were still welling up out of my nose) and saw two words written by my own hand while I was comatose: Fr34k1ng 1d10+5. “Indeed they are,” I thought to myself, “indeed they are.”

Late, when I went home, I felt different. Lighter in a way, though colder. It took a few weeks to realize it, but after that episode, I had no faith in my fellow humans anymore. And, though something inside of me had died and was gone forever, the only thing I could think to do was “learn to relax.”