You See The Damnest People At Wal-Mart

Howdy, Internet Surfers.  Thanks for coming by.  This post is suddenly wildly popular again and has been linked to the People Of Walmart website (though I think they’ve removed the link section at this point in order to keep up with their sudden popularity). The original rant about the Wasilla Alaska Wal-Mart is here.  Again, thanks for coming by and feel free to comment on this post and to look around Stonekettle Station

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You all know what I think of Wal-Mart.

I hate that stinking place.

No, hate is not nearly a strong enough word, loathe is more like it.

I really, really do. I loathe everything about Wal-Mart. And the Wasilla Wal-Mart? Well, there’s just a special kind of booger eating going on in there.

I avoid Wal-Mart like a Republican fundraiser, unfortunately, sometimes I really don’t have any options. I’ve just got to go there. And today was that kind of day. Now, when we do have to go to Wal-Mart, we try to go early on Sunday morning when every Christian Conservative (I.e. 99% of the MatSu population) is over at God’s house getting all holy with the Jebus. We’re usually in, out, and gone before the post-church marathon begins, because as near as I can tell without actually setting foot in a church, the standard Sunday message from the pulpit must be something like, “Jesus commands you to make haste from this place of worship, trampling the slower members of the flock if necessary, and hie thyself to the holy Wal-Mart where you will feast on McDonalds and roam the aisles loudly slurping coffee that tastes just like Pontius Pilate’s ass crack. Amen.”

Unfortunately, I had to go today – Saturday for those of you who are adrift in the time stream and have come unstuck from temporal reality. And even more unfortunately I didn’t get around to going until noon.

Saturday. At Noon. In the Wasilla, Alaska Wal-Mart.

Yep, we arrived precisely at primetime bizarroland hour.

Holy freakin’ crap.

Remember Wright’s Ten Laws Of Stupidity? Yeah, I may have understated those.

First lets start with with the economy. I’m calling Shenanigans on the whole “Recession/Depression” thing. Seriously. Because so far as I can tell, people have plenty of money. Shitloads of money. Every dipshit from Fairbanks to Edmonton was in Wal-Mart today, madly piling their carts high with crap like the Grinch packing his sleigh with stolen Christmas presents in Whoville. If this is what a depression looks like, it’s a wonder any of our grandparents managed to survive the 1930’s without being crushed under a mound of cheap consumer goods from China. It was like a feeding frenzy in there – seriously I thought the bargain DVD bin was going to get ripped apart like a pig carcass tossed into a piranha infested Brazilian river.

Then there was Witch Girl and Vampire Boy. I literally did a double take. No, really, thinking “holy shit, how in the 9th circle of hell did it get to Halloween already and I missed it?” She was dressed all in black, black boots, black skirt, black jacket, dyed black hair, black lipstick, black makeup like the rings around a raccoon's eyes. Black, well, except for the dead white, zombie-like skin – I believe that color is called “Dead In A Water Filled Ditch For Three Weeks White.” He was also dressed all in black, with the addition of a black Rocky Balboa hat and a ratty thin beard. Both looked as if they hadn’t showered in a while, a long while. And did I mention the piercings? I haven’t seen that much chrome outside of a Harley Davidson store since the last Terminator Movie. Speaking of movies, I looked around for the cameras, thinking maybe somebody was filming a sequel to 30 Days of Night.

Next it was The Bush Family. No not that Bush Family, the Alaskan Bush family. For those of you not from around here, the Bush is what we call any part of the state that basically hasn’t advanced past, oh, about 1830 – think Australian Outback with bears and moose instead of kangaroos and wallabies and you’re in the right ballpark. People live out there. Sort of. It sounds romantic I know, a log cabin hewn by your own sweat from the Alaskan wilderness, no electricity, no running water, no phones – just some sort of idyllic Disneyesque paradise free from the constraints of civilization. Reality is somewhat different. No running water and no electricity means no showers. Also, toilet paper is a major novelty. So is soap and toothpaste. So are clean clothes, haircuts, shaving and deodorant. Remember the shit covered peasants from Monty Python and the Holy Grail? Like that, only without the good dental hygiene. Look, I hate to be this way, but damn, you could smell these people from a long, long, way away. Filthy clothes, rancid grease, old sweat, rotten moose meat, and at least one of them had fallen into the outhouse, maybe more than one. There was an entire ecosystem living in Bush Man’s belly length beard, I swear I saw little eyes peeping out at me.

And speaking of that special ass flavor, there was Self Stocker Girl. She was unloading a cart of fresh vegetables. I noticed her because she kept stopping to scratch her ass. No, strike that. “Scratch her ass,” doesn’t properly describe it. She had an itch, way up there, way, way up there. She kept stopping to jab about three fingers far enough up her ass crack to perform a colonoscopy. Dig, dig, scratch, scratch. Then, she’d return to stocking the produce bins. Yeah. Produce. You’re really, really going to want to wash those fresh veggies. Just sayin’. Me, I'm sticking to canned for a while. Thanks.

There were at least four Screaming Babies. Screaming. Red faced. Tantrum throwing. Snot bubbling. Quivering chubby checks. Screaming incoherently. Like Rush Limbaugh on an Oxycontin bender. Maybe they got a whiff of the Bush Family, that sure made me feel cranky.

The coup d'état though, was The Blind Guy. Yeah, yeah, I’m about to go off on a blind guy – you know me, don’t even act surprised. Anyway, there was The Blind Guy. I know he was blind – the cane and the seeing-eye dog were dead giveaways. The dog had a big sign, Please Don’t Pet Me, I’m Working and Visually Impaired Assistance Animal. The reason I mention it was, well, Mr Blind Guy was perusing the gun counter. Allow me to repeat that, the blind guy was examining the handguns. Now obviously, the man had some vision, but seriously here folks – if you need a seeing eye dog, you probably shouldn’t be using a firearm. How does that work exactly? Does the dog do the aiming? Arf Arf, up up, right, no left, Ok … rut roh, no biscuit. Does the Alaska Department of Natural Resource go around and mark each game animal with Braille? Moose. Bear. Tourist. Oh don’t look at me like that (ba dump bump), a blind guy with a seeing eye dog at the gun counter? And I’m supposed to pretend that the jokes don’t just write themselves?

Yeah, Saturday at Wal-Mart, it’s like two-bit carnival freak-show.

What’s strangest creature you’ve ever seen at Wal-Mart?