Costco

Have you ever gone to Costco, on a Sunday? Or a Wallmart (pretty much ANYtime)?

I did. Today. Good God. There are not the obese dead as there are so much at Wallmart, but they are in attendance. What mostly disturbs me is the grand lack of awareness people have. As if, once they walk into the front door, they check their intelligence, their reactivity to their environment.

OK, when I go to Costco, I have what I affectionately like to call, a list. Today's list, unusually so, was brief. A single item in fact. When I go to Costco (and more to to Wallmart, which I keep to a minimum) I want only to get in, find the goods I need, buy them and get the Hell out as quickly and surreptitiously as possible.

But there are always such great overpowering obstacles to my noble endeavors.

As I enter, in much the same way like taking a child to Chucky Cheese, typically (one would assume), reasonably intelligent (one might assume) adults, turns into a mush of fascination, and desire, I suppose.

And so, after making it into the building, at times not a simple task, I come up against a monstrous wall of flesh, carts and frozen awareness.

Once I can get around that initial group of transcendental entrants, I breeze along through a pleasantly empty period of fresh abandonment that is soon to be dissolved into the second sad, energy sapping, wall of flesh and wheeled-wire baskets.

It is not unlike being in WWI, I think, in trying to navigate the trenches of the French front lines. Not that I was there, mind you, but I certainly now have a greater degree of understanding and empathy.

Not as much empathy as I have for myself however.

In the end, I do get my basket filled for whatever I needed, and then I make it somehow to a check out line from Hell (they have lots of things from Hell there) and I rush to a dead stop immediately leaving the checkout counter. Why? Because, some inseditious fool had designed the store so that once you leave paying for your goods, you run smack dab right into the line at the food counter and the associated seating area where you can slop down your cheap eats.

IF its possible, to move beyond these culinarily vacuous impingement machines, you are hopefully lucky enough to hit the front door where you are then summarily eyed and examined and possibly allowed to exit the building to continue your life until the next time where you have to completely repeat this same dreaded insanity.

And all that, for a bag of chips.