(no subject)
The plan, for my part at least, is to stay at Wal-Mart for nine consecutive hours, from 9 PM to 6 AM. This sounds like a daunting task, so I ask my friend Miko to accompany me during the stay, and he, being an imaginative fellow, agrees that it could potentially be a night of fun and of particular interest.
We plan on going prepared. In my backpack I have: an iPod with four genius playlists, 3,000 songs of impeccable taste (ahem), and three movies for desperate situations; speakers for iPod use; two energy drinks; caffeine pills (is that cheating?); notebook and pen; a small two-octave keyboard; and money. Miko brings a camera.
We leave our cell phones at home and take the 210 bus to Union Landing. This prevents us from calling in favors for rides home. We won’t allow ourselves the possibility of bailing, no matter how unbearable it may become. We want to witness the full results. We are not very optimistic, you see. We may only leave when the 6:30 AM bus arrives. God only knows what state we will be in then.
Union Landing is bright. We trek past Borders, the theater, Tony Roma’s, making silent farewells with lingering glances that show only how much we wish to be anywhere else, not even having arrived at our temporary home for the next few hours.
Wal-Mart. It looks the same at nine at night as it does in the day. Unchanging. We proceed through the double doors, which open for us as automatically and welcoming as a gaping mouth.
Fluorescence. People. Merchandise. Should’ve brought suntan lotion. Immediately, almost reflexively, we look for a place to sit down. We easily scope out the darkest corner in Wal-Mart: the swing benches with towering pavilions shading a small area from the fluorescent glare. I’m a little worried that we are so put out only upon arrival. We resolve to leave our brief refuge and scope out the surroundings for places of interest and for potential time killing, and to return in no less than two-hour intervals.
We take a brief walk through the giant store, and sum it up into general areas: McDonald’s, which to our relief, stays open 24 hours as well, but to our disappointment lacks a dollar menu (gloom); the food aisles; cosmetics; toys; auto parts sales; electronics; orchard supply; shoes; clothes; babies (not the actual disgusting creatures, just their needs, etc); outdoor/patio furniture. There is also a pharmaceutical section, which catches our attention and holds a special interest for us.
We start in the back, with the babies’ section. It has car seats, cribs, and toys for infants. There is a stand that plays sample selections of music you play for babies when they’re in the car, asleep, or whenever else you feel like subjecting them to it. It is amazing. We play with this for a full half hour, DJ-ing it into all sorts of remixed, unintelligible non-melodies. It is baby-brain-boosting Mozart, rock-a-bye, and wheels-on-the-bus turned into a stream of ridiculous baby-unfriendly noise.
It is getting late and everything is becoming funny. We take a double dose of caffeine pills and proceed to the electronics section.
There are speakers and radios. We instantly proceed to change every station on every boom box to the 90.3 frequency, which is absolutely nothing but static-saturated white noise, then to the highest volume possible without attracting immediate attention. We shuffle away, pretending to be absorbed in a TV channel showing proper flower arrangement techniques in the TV aisle. No one buys TVs to watch this crap, and yet all thirty or so television sets have been switched to this same channel demonstrating diversified plant colors, plant length, flower saturation. We turn around and there is a tragic old man amidst the radios tuning all of our hard-earned white noise to respective R&B, soft rock, and jazz deaths. They are all now at what I suppose he believes is a reasonable volume.
We walk towards the mini-aquariums and fish tanks,
but are stopped by a girl named Andrea Concepcion, who seems to know Miko. We throw around some pointless, circular conversation. I ask her what she is doing at Wal-Mart at what is now 12:00 PM, while wondering to myself at how quickly the time has passed. A terse “Cuz’ there’s nothing else open,” and she is gone. I can think of a list of places that are open, but acknowledge that not many of them are worth going to on a Friday night (sarcasm). We continue. The aquariums all have that slightly blue-pigmented water or glass that leaves it looking very large and spacious when it really isn’t. The fish are small and look very edible and this is when we notice that we are hungry. We take some pictures and play around with the colored lenses and get visually psychedelic effects. Caffeine pills, a sip of water.
Satisfied, we walk to McDonald’s, which, in this case, is literally within walking distance, as opposed to being home and having to consider taking a ten or fifteen-minute walk to McDonald’s, which according to typical parental standards, is “perfectly reasonable on such a nice day and on such youthful legs as yours and why don’t you get a job there while you’re at it?”
Upon arrival, we are again met with the downer that there is no dollar-menu, but this is not an issue as we are loaded, and with money comes the power to buy two value meals and cheeseburgers with Big-Mac sauce. My cheeseburger with Big-Mac sauce has neither cheese nor Big-Mac sauce, and after a bit of impatient confrontation, I get four slices of un-melted cheese and a huge dollop of the sauce in a Big-Mac carton. We have at it and go wild with the sauce, which goes in the burgers, on the fries, and for some reason, ends up in my unfinished Sprite. Dares ensue to drink this beverage, which in my opinion no longer qualifies as a beverage. It is now 12:30 AM and we are gradually growing less than sane. This could be blamed on the constant reinforcement of caffeine, dubious effects of prolonged exposure to the fluorescent glow, or the extended waking period. Perhaps it wasn’t such a good idea to sleep at 4:30 AM the previous morning. I swear there is a rip in the space-time continuum at Wal-Mart. In Wal-Mart, I am reminded of a Wednesday afternoon at all times of the day, every day.
After our meal we are thoroughly pooped and go back to the swing chairs in the patio furniture section for a bit of shade and reclined relaxation. We start on 2001: A Space Odyssey on my iPod and are actually ten minutes into it, but aren’t into it. We listen to some music and in ten minutes, feel refreshed and recharged. It could be the caffeine, but I like to believe it was my genius playlist. A woman wearing what looks like two pounds of makeup and, rounding up, maybe two ounces of clothing walks by. Geez, she’s at Wal-Mart at 1:00 AM, not some kind of rave vomit-party.
We hit the toys section. There is a pair of two-wheeled skateboards on the floor, as if waiting for us to come along and pick them up and put them to our use.
After ten minutes, we are still unsure as to how to go about balancing on two wheels on a skateboard, accustomed to the typical four. I suggest great speed and momentum, but we are too scared to try it for both our safety and lest we be yelled at/kicked out by the night manager. There is a guy about our age holding a basketball, eyeing our lack of progress with the pseudo-quasi-skateboards with expressionless, yet contained sniveling disdain. He holds his basketball like he is a pro. Perhaps he is, but he doesn’t have to go about it in such a pretentious manner. He must’ve been holding onto it for the last hour or so, as the basketball cage is way at the back of the store and he goes with no definite progress in any particular direction. He dribbles it every so often, and takes slow-motion quicksteps around invisible opponents that are no match for him. I remember doing this when I was five, so there’s not much more to say.
We pass by a massive shopping cart lineup at the returns desk,
and find ourselves in a full aisle of keyboards very much like my own. I take that out, and we are soon amidst a symphony of kiddy-keyboards going wild and attracting attention from people that look normal but can’t be because they are shopping for every day necessities at Wal-Mart at 2:00 AM and look like they do this every day. We find voice-distortion devices with dials for “alien”, “monster”, and “robot”. Interesting to know the industry interpretations for what these entities would sound like, suppose they existed. We play with this for what is literally an hour in conjunction with our keyboard symphony. After another caffeine break, we get up and head for the shoes section.
We are feeling whimsical and nostalgic, and search the aisles for the LA-Lights shoes of our childhood. Finding none, Miko remarks, “Man, this generation of kids is missing out.” I agree. What could be more symbolic of childhood than having lights flashing like the enthusiasm for life beneath heels forever running from the present desiring the future, to grow up, to be something else, like…I dunno, Doc Martens or Vans slip-ons or whatever.
The depressing thing about every shoe in the aisles is that they are all what I could perfectly expect to see someone from a crowd, someone forgettable, wearing. They are all leather shoes with the same basic skeleton with slightly different uncreative contours. They are all the same sad shades of beige, tan, and brown. We jokingly try on open toed sandals with our socks on, preparing for middle-aged life, but walk away a half-hour later rather quickly. Suspecting a die-down in energy, we pop caffeine pills and walk to the food aisle, impatient for a spike in spirits.
We are in the frozen food aisle of the food section and we are immediately, absurdly happy. It is on our faces, lit by the bright display lights through the glass doors of the refrigerated foods section. We walk past the twelve brands of tortilla chips, twenty or so flavors of Pringles, Doritos in bags one, two, four, eight, sixteen serving-sizes large in varieties of Cool, Ranch, Cheddar. Bags of unmarked, foil-wrapped Easter candy do not look very appealing but appear to be selling very quickly. Dreyer’s ice cream is on display in all its varieties, and is being restocked. Store brand ice cream is decent, but no one knows because no one tries it. It is not being restocked. There are four brands of peanut butter and at least three varieties for each.
We notice, in some moment of awareness, that the aisle, the ceiling, the entire store is lined, plastered, literally covered with signs that say “Always low prices always”. It is unreasonable how many there are, more unreasonable than the extra redundant “always” in each sign. It is unreal, it is not to be believed.
And then we have our epiphany. We realize that it is our mission now, to do the seemingly impossible task of counting each and every single one of these signs in the entire goddamn store. We must do this because it is approximately 4:00 AM, and it is as insane and ridiculous as we feel at this very moment. With glazed, bleary-eyed, artificially awake smiles at each other, we have all the mutual consent we need to begin this arduous task.
We start in the back. Past the baby’s music DJ booth, past the car seats that would be soiled, peed-in and fretted over, on to the clothes section. We’ve counted hundreds. Past generic clothes with cheap marketing and almost guaranteed to largely fit a population of overweight shoppers in sizes always larger than the one you want, past socks that come in varieties knee-length, mid-knee, standard, ankle-length, and below ankle-length. There are less signs here. Up and down the shoe aisles containing hundreds, thousands, millions of the same sandals, slippers, high-heels, tennis shoes that your mom always pores over for that unnecessary hour when she would really get the same results were she shopping blind-folded. We have counted more signs and it is now a battle to count, to stay awake, to pay attention to signs and not to merchandise. We are picking them off like casualties of some fell battle by the tens, the hundreds, the thousands; one at a time, two at a time, and with each rush of energy chocking into our overshot and overworked systems, three at a time. I count singles, and Miko keeps track of each hundred I count. Then we switch off, Miko singles and me hundreds, getting what mental rest I can. We pass the radios, past streams of simultaneous rap, jazz, rock. We pay careful attention to count individual signs that have appeared in a smaller-sized form as labels on specific on-sale items. They have not escaped us.
We take a tension-filled break at the restroom by the auto parts section.
We chug our energy drinks with our caffeine supplements, inhaling the invigorating smell of new tires and stand for a minute; yet all we really want to do is to continue counting.
Our obsessive-compulsive complexes kick in and give us a second wind and we begin as a whirlwind down the aisles of the toy section and food aisles. We pick our way carefully through orchard supply, then onward to cosmetics, where we are temporarily blinded by the bright display lights and get brief glimpses of our haggard, yet, awake faces as we run-walk past sampling mirrors. We are winding down in energy and to the final deadline of 6:00 AM as we finish Pharmaceuticals, which is easy because there are no low prices anywhere in that section and they haven’t bothered to advertise so.
And we have finished. We have finished digging, checking out, observing, chilling. We have counted the absurd, inappropriate number of a total of 1,445 grammatically incorrect signs. We feel complete, accomplished, and thoroughly unhealthy outside of Wal-Mart. It is still dark out, and Wal-Mart is still bright. Everything makes sense in some undervalued, “I’m-alive” feeling. Sure, it’s just Wal-Mart, and sure, it was only a total waste of a couple of hours out of our brimming-with-potential lives, but it was spent, and spent in the assumedly most-uninhabitable place at the assumedly most-uninhabitable time of the day. I figure if you never really spend your time doing nothing and learning to enjoy it, you’ll never really know what the hell the point of spending it at all really is, or what to do when you’ve spent it all, and all those other sublime, meaningful conclusions about life. I’m just saying that I don’t think it was a total waste of time.
We’d like to dedicate our thanks to the caffeine pill.
Thanks to the caffeine pill, Life has been substituted. The night, potentially wasted in sleep, unremembered dreams and pieced-together firings of impossible fantasies of flying and falling, spent rather at Wal-Mart, in real tangible experiences with the dark eye-circles and suffering grades to show for it. No more lying awake, picking up of books and movies read and watched time and time again, or eating when you’re already full but just bored and awake. Insomniac nation, here we come.
