A few weeks ago, Horatio’s mom decides to leave him a food-check for him to have his way with while she’s busy at work. He tells me this, with the addition of, “Yeah, and we’re going to get blazed before we use this at Wal-Mart.” Going into Wal-mart high would be one of the single greatest confirmations of this society’s attempts to control its populus, or at least the powers of smoking-induced paranoia. Here’s the story:
We pull into the parking landscape(Wal-mart parking areas are not merely lots, they’re gargantuan in proportions) and find an abandoned corner where I would later offer to help someone with engine trouble, despite my complete ignorance of car-workings, and get turned down, thank god, because they didn’t speak English. With the sound of carts squeaking several rows back, we took GBs in his car, which overlooked the valley of trees below the random hill this Super Center had been plopped upon. Slowly but surely, I feel the slight tingle in the back of my mind, the slow awareness of being high and understanding things on a more base level. Every so often I pop my head out of the car like a prairie dog to watch, with suspicion, the cars roll by, all of them lost in the asphalt sea of anonymity. At one point a fire-truck rolled by, which peaked my interest for about 30 seconds, causing me to wonder why the fuck a fire-truck was here. I didn’t see a fire.
A casual, but patient observer would notice that 10 minutes after our arrival, the smoke would cease to plume from Horatio’s open windows. This was our time to act. Every feeling is enhanced– the sun on my back, though typically obnoxious, was now invited with warmth and happiness. The air-conditioning, though, when entering a Wal-mart, kicks more fucking ass. A strong gust of chilled, Freon-enriched air? Are you kidding me? Awesome. Near the entrance, with fresh fruits and vegetables and meat to our right, we see a handful of firemen. It turns out that these people need food too, and they go out with their unit to shop. All this time I figured someone paid for their food, delivered it, or that they were beings of which food was no use. Either way, I was surprised. They were like a group of friends, all understanding their place, but enjoying the bond they had, strengthened by their purpose as it was. It’s strange, also, because as we encountered them two more times in the Super Center(something fucking hard to do in something so big), I noticed how important unit-mentality can be. But then again, I already knew this, but, because I was high, thought it was brilliant, so I ramble on about how Horatio, myself, and our friends are a “unit of awesome, unstoppable in our own right, able to achieve greater things as a whole, the whole greater than the sum of its parts” and so on. While I’m exploring these ideas out loud, something some might call diarrhea of the mouth, Horatio is actually doing what we came to do– looking for the grandest of munchies. Eventually, I muster some self-control for my mouth, probably by re-routing control over some lesser part of my body– I may have started letting loose the ass-cannon from time to time(social acceptability is out the window the minute you get high, though, so whatever)– so as to help look for, as I said, the grandest of munchies. We manage to get random shit like cheese-filled poppers and lots and lots of ice pops, which, by the way, kick ass during the summer. I eat those things without restraint. I mean, with delicious ingredients like sugar, water, flavor #12, and coloring #34, who could lose?
Then we go back into the packaged meat section, and that’s where I first saw it. Rows and rows of televisions suspended from the ceiling, all synced up on the same, endless string of commercials. The idea behind these? While people are walking around, they don’t care that there are TVs hung delicately above them that are broadcasting “BUY, BUY, BUY” and it sinks, ever so slightly, into the subconscious. One after another, the commercials plug products that are not 4 feet away. It’s not illegal to implant ideas into someone’s mind this way, but damn, what’s next? This is probably worse than when grocery stores were set up in mazes so that you had to go down every aisle to get to the end, thus exposing you to all the great deals on the way. That’s also why, when waiting in line, the store provides a canal of goodies right before you check the fuck out. It’s like a last-ditch effort to make you buy everything in your power to buy. “Here, you want some gum don’t you? You haven’t had any in awhile? What, you’d rather have a candy bar? We have that too, you fat fuck, BUY IT!” TVs are worse, however, because it’s more subtle, and people care less about it, as it’s not slowing their shopping down at all.
It’s crazy because I went
from giving “unit-mentality” verbal fellatio to understanding a
greater, more powerful type of bond– a collectivism of control. I was
worried. What if more places employed these methods? What if all of
them already have, but do it in a better, less noticeable fashion than
Wal-mart? I lose my shit for about 10 minutes, and Horatio and I
discuss, with shifty eyes checking over shoulders, the power of
Wal-mart. Ha, yes, the power of Wal-mart. Eventually, though, I calm
down and resign myself to the idea that as long as I have knowledge of
these types of control, I can avoid their effect. We agree and continue
gathering food until we realize how full the cart is, so we go to check
out, but right before we do we pass under a little white box hung from
the ceiling by a pipe with, I suspect, wires and what not– much like
the TVs, although this was a speaker of sorts. In between fits of
static, it actually fucking goes “Aisle 12,” or “Sale,” or “Lettuce”!
JESUS, they’ve actually got fucking boxes that tell you to DO SHIT.
Neither
that nor the TVs effected our purchases, I kept track of that, but at
the checkout, Horatio fell victim to the classic
waiting-in-line-goodie-rack, and bought a candy bar or gum, I can’t
remember. I do remember him saying, “Fuck, it worked.”
POST SCRIPT
Just a little side note here, I completely and wholly advocate smoking and going into Wal-mart or any big store with varied people, really. There are so many fucking different people you can view there. If you’re the type of observer that likes catching small glimpses of people’s lives, do it, it’s an incredible experiment. While there, I saw the hottest single mother ever, two brothers talking about pasta, a mother scolding her child, fucking firemen(what the hell?), and other really random people. It’s just good exposure. Just don’t let the TVs and subliminal buy-shit-boxes tell you what to do.
written June 24th, 2006
Your stuff is hilarious.
Posted by: Nicole | 08/21/2006 at 09:21 AM