Straight No Chaser

The previous post was an accumulation of two days of nothing happening before I could come up with even the slightest pretense to post. But a 20 minute trip to Walmart, and here I am with a wealth of material with which to present to you after carefully weaving my leftist political agenda through it. (I'm kidding. Or am I??)

I realized yesterday that I had forgotten both of my towels at home. Anyone who has ever read anything by Douglas Adams knows just how bad this is. But I didn't panic! Instead, I toddled over to the cess pool of stupidity, incest, and great sales that is Walmart and wandered up and down the aisles with a confused look on my face, hoping that an employee would offer help. Of course, while most of the people who work there are inbred to the point of it not being funny anymore, they do have a certain inborn cleverness when it comes to sneaky and shifty things, like accosting small mammals, and avoiding doing work wherever possible. So every time I walked by an employee, they were in the middle of doing something, like tying their shoe laces or restocking clothes or opening and closing doors. Being the nice person that I am, I didn't have the heart to interrupt them, so I continued valiantly on my quest for an employee who would offer me help. Then I saw him: someone who was too oblivious or too stupid to realize that there was a customer about. He was just walking down the aisle. I looked at him hopefully. Then I realized from the way his mouth was gaping, from the rivulets of saliva that were running down his chin, and from the vacant look in his eyes that he was indeed to stupid and oblivious to notice that I was a customer, and that he was also probably too stupid or verbally incompetent to answer any question I might pose to him (though, for the record, this was through no fault of his own). Dismayed, I did the first thing that came to mind and stared openly at him as he shuffled by. Then I began to think a bit more carefully. If I were an employee in a non-commissioned, dead-end job on the graveyard shift, I would do all within my power to avoid talking to customers. The most obvious way of doing this would be to do what the other ones were doing: namely, pretending to be busy as soon as a customer walks by. But in this situation, you're always in danger of being bothered by people who aren't as kind to them as I am. So instead, the best thing to do would be to act like a complete retard, and if anyone asks you for anything, gesticulate wildly, pointing in all directions, while uttering guttural phrases and handing them a copy of the Disablities Act which makes it illegal for you to be fired because of performances like this. Yes, this guy has it all figured out. Obviously, he was a notch above his co-workers. Or he was just retarded. But I repeat myself.

After I found a towel (MY towel now), I also found a can opener. Upon purchasing it, I doubled my food supply. I have a ton of canned food, but until I saw a can opener on one of the endcaps at the store, it had simply not entered into my mind that I actually have a lot of food beyond ramen. Oh well. I headed to the checkout line with my can opener and my towel (whew). I got in line, and afforded a casual glance around the area, to see if they were going to get me. Nothing out of the ordinary. Except for the fact that every other person in a 20 cubit radius was an ugly female. And not Meryl Streep ugly. We're talking chicks who can and do grow a better moustache than me. That's scary. And as I realized that I was surrounded by the heavier half of a Weight Watchers chapter, I reflected that the midwest seems to be the black hole of ugly. Everywhere else that I've been (not too many places, I'll admit, but I have been all over the east coast, lots of Ontario, and various parts of England), the ratio of ugly to hot has been smaller than most people's attention spans. Maybe it's because they keep getting distracted by the hot chicks. But here in the midwest, we put up with humpback whale conventions at Walmart checkouts, and think nothing of it. I'm not saying that all the chicks in the midwest are ugly (the two Hillsdale townies whom I know are hot), but even with all that hot, we just ain't makin' up for the ugly. I have no idea why this is, but it really does suck. Maybe all the beautiful people move to the coasts, where either the weather is warmer, or there is... culture? That's probably what it is. Oh well, I'll live with it until I'm done with college.

See, a 20 minute trip, and two paragraphs for the blog. I really should get out more.