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.
Saturday, December 17, 2005
Of Mouse and Man
It’s me versus a little mouse, and I’m kind of rooting for the mouse.
He scurried across the floor the other day, from the living room closet to the kitchen tile to that little section of the apartment that’s immune to my X-ray vision, where the little rascal made his escape. I didn’t see him, but my common-law fiancée shrieked as if our puppy’s head had done a 360 because the devil was inside her.
Shudder.
Now, I could probably co-exist with little Mickey, so long as I didn’t find tiny paw prints in my Count Chocula. But the ol’ ball and chain apparently knows more about zoology than I do, and I’d forgotten they’d perpetuated AIDS and the Black Death and handlebar mustaches all those years ago.
So I had to get some traps from the apartment handyman, a mustachioed man named Schneider.
I was hoping Schneider would give me the standard mousetrap like in the cartoons, the ones that do the job with a quick snap, the ones Disney characters sung about on their ill-advised disco record (“Mousetrap! Will snap! And grab him by the tail…”). Instead, he gave me a couple of glue boards that smell like mouse perfume that I can put near all the mouse holes in the Love Lair.
So now I’ve got to wait for the little guy to cruise out of his hole, like all of us just trying to grab that chedda, and stumble onto my Rectangle of Death, where I presume he will die a slow death by lack of lactose, wishing he’d just ordered a pizza or something.
I don’t really want that, and not just because it’ll be icky to throw the little dead guy away. If not for the disturbingly hairless pink tail, that little Jerry could pass for my adorable if useless pet hamster.
So maybe he can get away. Maybe he can drop an anvil on me, or make me run off a cliff and I won’t notice until I look down and then I’ll fall to my death, or he’ll paint a fake mouse hole in the wall for me to bump my head on.
I just hope I get there before his eyes are fully X-ed, so I don’t have to see the little guy struggling to get free from his little tar pit. That would be traumatic for me, and worse for him.
You know what?
I’m picking up those glue boards.
Oh, Mickey, what a pity, you don’t understand, you take columnist Jacob Bennett by the heart when you take him by the hand. Oh, Mickey, you’re so pretty, can’t you understand, it’s guys like you, Mickey, ooh what you do, Mickey, do Mickey, e-mail him at jacobmbennett@hotmail.com, don’t break his heart, Mickey.
He scurried across the floor the other day, from the living room closet to the kitchen tile to that little section of the apartment that’s immune to my X-ray vision, where the little rascal made his escape. I didn’t see him, but my common-law fiancée shrieked as if our puppy’s head had done a 360 because the devil was inside her.
Shudder.
Now, I could probably co-exist with little Mickey, so long as I didn’t find tiny paw prints in my Count Chocula. But the ol’ ball and chain apparently knows more about zoology than I do, and I’d forgotten they’d perpetuated AIDS and the Black Death and handlebar mustaches all those years ago.
So I had to get some traps from the apartment handyman, a mustachioed man named Schneider.
I was hoping Schneider would give me the standard mousetrap like in the cartoons, the ones that do the job with a quick snap, the ones Disney characters sung about on their ill-advised disco record (“Mousetrap! Will snap! And grab him by the tail…”). Instead, he gave me a couple of glue boards that smell like mouse perfume that I can put near all the mouse holes in the Love Lair.
So now I’ve got to wait for the little guy to cruise out of his hole, like all of us just trying to grab that chedda, and stumble onto my Rectangle of Death, where I presume he will die a slow death by lack of lactose, wishing he’d just ordered a pizza or something.
I don’t really want that, and not just because it’ll be icky to throw the little dead guy away. If not for the disturbingly hairless pink tail, that little Jerry could pass for my adorable if useless pet hamster.
So maybe he can get away. Maybe he can drop an anvil on me, or make me run off a cliff and I won’t notice until I look down and then I’ll fall to my death, or he’ll paint a fake mouse hole in the wall for me to bump my head on.
I just hope I get there before his eyes are fully X-ed, so I don’t have to see the little guy struggling to get free from his little tar pit. That would be traumatic for me, and worse for him.
You know what?
I’m picking up those glue boards.
Oh, Mickey, what a pity, you don’t understand, you take columnist Jacob Bennett by the heart when you take him by the hand. Oh, Mickey, you’re so pretty, can’t you understand, it’s guys like you, Mickey, ooh what you do, Mickey, do Mickey, e-mail him at jacobmbennett@hotmail.com, don’t break his heart, Mickey.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
