xtcian

7/13/03 Columbia County, NY (27

7/13/03 Columbia County, NY (27 days until wedding)

I usually like going to a Walmart; something about the vastness of choice and the insanely cheap Equate brand generics give me a consumerist hard-on every time. But there's something about the Hudson, NY Walmart that is just dreadful. It's worse than the one in the San Gabriel Valley outside Los Angeles, it's worse than the ones on I-26 in Alabama, and it's way worse than my first Walmart in Durham, North Carolina.

This is going to sound really judgmental and snobby, which is probably because I'm a total asshole, but the clientele at this Walmart is particularly depressing. The average weight of your typical patron hovers over 275, and the hairstyles, O God, my Captain, my Captain! It is truly the land before Mullets Galore, because these people are serious. The guy in front of me had a perfectly normal butt-cut, except the hair in the back went clear past his ass. The lady behind me looked like Steve Perry.

The aisles are way too narrow at this particular Walmart; if two people enter an aisle, one of them has to back out and risk knocking over the display of Equate brand Acid Reducers. The women's clothing section, featuring Faded Glory® jeans, also had denim vests with leather tassles (XXXL size only). I tried to imagine how any human could look good in these things - even imagined Tessa wearing it - and started laughing to myself (which made me look like the insane one).

While waiting for my film to develop, I checked out the "Featured CD's" [sic] rack, and found all of today's hits available in AMENDED form, meaning that Walmart International went through all the lyrics and jettisoned those they found objectionable. There was also a huge rack of Darryl Worley's album "Have You Forgotten?" which gave forth the putrescence of white male redneck anger, featuring pictures of Darryl visiting his favorite kick-ass daisy-cuttin' Army grunts as they rid the world of a few more brown people.

September 11 was a goddamn banner day for country music; every other business suffered setbacks, but our twangin' fellers have taken to fetishizing it all they can, even featuring websites with pictures of burning Manhattan. The truth is that most of these Branson-bound balladeers typically despise the New Yorkers who were most traumatized by the events themselves. If I were a real jerk, I'd say that artists like Worley only used 9/11 to sell more records, and his country brethren only use 9/11 to further foment their natural racism. But I'm not that much of a jerk.

Shit, who cares. Do any Darryl Worley fans read this blog?

Anyway, the trip to Walmart got more and more depressing until I had to run out of there before my film was developed and go sit in the parking lot with Chopin the dog. We ate soy chips and talked about our nation's vanishing downtowns, and then drove off into the hills.