Welfareloser's Blog

or, more specifically, we blow at walmart. i try to stay the heck out of walmart, partly because walmart is evil, but mostly because walmart scares me. we live on the outskirts of town, right before “town” turns into “cornfields.” they turned one of those cornfields into another walmart. now, the original walmart downtown is trashy. the people who shop there are yucky. THIS walmart is worse. the people who shop there are not the yuckiest people in our twin cities (pop. 100,000), but the yuckiest people from a dozen tiny rural towns within 20 miles (pop.s 400 – 3,000, if you count the cows.) and lemme tell ya… the jazzy scooters have more flesh oozing off them, the grins have more air whistling through them, the mullets are longer, the kids dirtier, the teen moms younger, the grammar poorer, the laughs louder and more gravelly, and overall, everybody is more fragrant.

now, unfortunately, my husband has been working for two months without pay, we have $30 in our checking accout, and most damning of all, i’m lazy and this walmart is 2 minutes from my house instead of 20 like every other freakin store in town. so i went grocery shopping there a while back. it wasn’t the best idea. it smells bad there. smells bad + morning sickness = me puking in the meat aisle. my best friend nodamnsense asked me if the person who came to clean it up was pissed at me for puking, perhaps assuming that i was drunk, and i told him i didn’t tell anyone to come clean it up because, really, it’s walmart, and my puke on the floor was an improvement as far as that hellhole was concerned.

so yesterday, it was way too hot to drive across town, and i’m way too broke and lazy, too! so we went to walmart. i must say, one thing in their favor: they’ve got the best 3-kid carts ever. they make an extendo-limo version that has these cushy plastic thrones that not only do not face the person pushing the cart (and more importantly, that person’s kickable shins,) the cushy seats are offset from each other, at an angle, so the kids are sort of facing each other, but can’t really kick each others’ shins, either. the entire contraption, with 3 kids and $170 worth of food, probably weighed a good 300 lbs (at least,) but i’m not gonna complain.

so first off, i tell the boys it’s time to get in the car. evilgremlin, the only boy with even an occasional hint of sense, puts on his socks and shoes. spazmonkey runs off mumbling “sockth an shooth, sockth an shooth, sockth an shooth.” he comes back wearing his pirate hat, a lightsaber, a t-shirt, and his rubber boots. i ask him where his pants are. “no pantth!” i tell him he needs pants. “no pantth!” so i turn around to deal with dramaqueen first, who is digging through the toy bins under the coffee table looking for his shoes. he is inexplicably butt nekkid. his shoes are, of course, on the mat next to the front door, exactly where they always are.

half an hour later, we’s at the walmarts. i opened a can of pringles for them, and in a fit of “i will eat these before my brothers do” gone horribly wrong, spazmonkey was forced to eject the mushy remains of at least 40 freakin pringles over an impressively large area of floor. (nodamnedsense says that he’ll be surprised if walmart doesn’t have a restraining order against me by the end of the year.) once the entertainment value of eating all the junkfood they can handle had worn off, they contented themselves with pretending to be the walmart PA system, screeching at startled passersby things like “ALL DA CHIKIN NUGGETS IS IN DA AISLE NINETEEEEEEEN!” and “MR. JONES YOUR CAR DA QUESTION IS DA DA DA DA DA DA AISLE FOURTEEEEEEEEN!” and “I WANT ICE CREAM AISLE TWOOOOOOO!” this got us safely to the checkout, where i successfully shut them up with push pops.

now, another thing about walmart: it claims to be a grocery store, but it’s really more of a junkfood emporium. if i had the time and someone was paying me to do it, i’d sit down and calculate the square footage of shelf frontage taken up by junk food vs. that taken up by more healthful food, and compare it to other grocery stores. when i shop at schnucks, i come home with tofu, bakery bread, fresh vegetables and fruits, and the like. when i come back from walmart, i seem to have purchased barbecue vienna sausages, triple-butter microwave popcorn, and cheez whiz. where schnucks would have yielded frozen stir-fry dishes, maybe something as bad for me as a hot pocket, walmart gave me “HUNGRY MAN CLASSIC FRIED CHICKEN WITH POTATOES AND A BROWNIE ONE FULL POUND OF FOOD!!!!” i think that weight i’ve been fighting like hell to gain for this pregnancy… may be on its way soon.