Roads, Mills, Laps

The whole country has become a zoo. People are running everywhere, grabbing at sacks of shit, slapping their slow neighbor’s hand.

I walked into a Kohls the other day. It was on Black Friday: I went there to observe. A line formed from the door to the exit door (approximately half a mile in length). It had the dim lit look and blackened banana smell of some third-world country. I saw a woman in a wheelchair, slumped over with one hand supporting her forlorn head; the other hand held piles of coats and pants, jeans and dresses, across her lap. The stack of clothes reached the top of her bonneted wig.

When the line crept forward, she inched her wheelchair forward with one rickety leg. Sometimes her foot would slip on the brown leg of a wayward pair of slacks that had fallen to the floor. She’d kick and kick with her leg–flailing wildly–and went nowhere until the impatient person behind her in line holding the supermagical Tassimo coffee machine and i-robodog would reluctantly decide to push her forward, onward. The old lady was well on her way to the cash register, with stacks of things for herself cradled in her withered hands; she was going to meet with Christ in his manger.

I saw this happen a couple times and then I got the hell out there.
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I’ve seen some other things.

There’s a competition in my neighborhood. I haven’t quite figured it out, but I think it entails not making any of your own decorations: you buy them down the road after driving 100mph to get there; you hand your credit card to the pimply kid with the Santa hat who works in the “Christmas World” shop that once was “Halloween Adventure” just a few months ago.

So in this competition, you have to buy a bunch of light-up shit, not bother to bury any of the cords, and just drop it in all front of your ‘lawn.’ Someone across the street from me has an electric train running next to a white deer with a red nose. Further down the street, someone has the same white deer; they live across the street from someone who has the same train. Some people have trains and others have white deer; some have both trains and deer.
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And others yet have blow-up Mickey Mouses or Harley Santas. These blights come with giant air compressors that use electricity which is generated by consuming the nation’s petroleum reserves. The compressors’ rattling rings forth in my little development at all hours of the night. I get to hear it when I’m all tucked in my little bed, dreaming of my little sugarplums, planning my little Tyler Durden missions to stick the Harley in my neighbor’s sacred parking space, to throw the rest of the million decorations into the streets, like some Paris Commune barricade, forcing the yentas to dwell on the complete absurdity of it all as they clear the streets to drive to the stores.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 5th, 2006 at 8:51 pm and is filed under McWorld. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.