Stop tempting me, smiley face!

Stupid Wal-Mart. It seems like I’m there every day, inside your blue-gray walls with the every day low prices and the smiley-faced rollbacks.

What will it take to break your spell? Why am I repeatedly tractor-beamed into your bustling parking lot with the mulleted cart-pushers on the lookout for fresh produce, garden hoses and deodorant?

Why can’t I resist the call to your dairy aisle? Why must I obey your siren song, drawing me into the hair care aisle with the Dapper Dan treatment? And why did you turn my friend into a Horny Toad?

Why is it that when I just need some flippin’ milk I end up with tennis balls, a spool of yarn and boxes of Trojan Magnums? Just kidding about that last one.

It was easier to resist when I was in Meade County, nestled smack in the heart of Sasquatch country, where there wasn’t a Supercenter within 30 miles.

But every place I’ve lived since then has some Waltony goodness a couple of blocks away. Now it’s the closest grocery store to the ol’ Love Shack, and if I run out of bread or beef or boxers, I just hip-hop over to the one-stop shop.

I’m not even mad about the typical stuff people hate Wal-Mart for. Mom and Pop’s store wouldn’t close if we called every once in a while. And I’ve never seen an employer that liked paying more than he had to.

But it always takes 20 minutes to find a parking space and 10 more to trek to the automatic doors with the cheerful elderly greeters.

Friday night I discoed over there on what should have been a five-minute trip to grab some Margarita Mix to make a depressing night of “Living With Fran” and “Reba” tolerable. That’s when the lights went out in Georgia.

“Do we need anything else while we’re here?” my common law fiancée asked.

“I hope not,” I grumbled.

“Yeah, we do,” she said. “We need milk and paper and hamster bedding.”

“Razzlefrazzinsunuvagrumble,” I said (that’s newspaper speak for obscenities). “I guess if we’re going down the hamster aisle we might as well get the dog a bone.”

Two hours and $200 later, we had the Mexican drink mix and enough food to feed an Ethiopian village, or one rapidly expanding hack writer. But at least I didn’t think I’d be seduced for a few days by your chicken breasts and aisle of leggings, Wal-Mart.

I couldn’t find my scissors when I got home so I used a Jason Voorhees-approved kitchen knife to slice the plastic off my new dog bone.

The knife poked a hole in my finger that only a SpongeBob Band-Aid could tourniquet.
And don’t it just figure?


We were out of Band-Aids.
Sigh. Get my keys.

Columnist Jacob Bennett is a redneck woman, he ain’t no high class broad, he’s just a product of his raisin’, he says “hey y’all” and “yeehaw.” And he keeps his Christmas lights on his front all year long, and he knows the words to every Charlie Daniels song. So here’s to all his sisters out there keepin’ it country. Let him get a big e-mail at jacobmbennett@hotmail.com from the redneck girls like me.