Thursday, March 29, 2007

project 365 #88: Moodily Lit Ingles

Sometimes I think, you know, that a whole day might go by when I didn't have to go to the Haywood Road Ingles. In my dreams, in a kind of lottery winning over the rainbow kind of utopic dream: I don't have to go to Ingles today. Wouldn't that be excellent? Ah, it is but a crazy dream. I must go to Ingles every day; it is required.

Today all I had to get was some dogfood and laundry detergent, because I left the Ingles and did my laundry and in the middle of it went to the Patton Avenue K-Mart, which I refuse to photograph on the grounds that I don't want any suicides hanging over my karma. The Patton Avenue K-Mart is where all hope and dreams come to die. It's the land of sorrow and infinite malaise, and it sells nothing. It sells nothing in fluorescent lit, grungy, unhappy aisles of sad faced children. For example, it sells no ladies' underwear. No, wait it does -it sells the ladies' underwear of the damned. The damned, who, when they're not wearing size 10 white cotten jockey briefs, prefer to wear bright yellow lace trimmed boy shorts with already flaking decals of Winnie the Pooh characters on them. I'm sorry, but I don't want Christopher Robin or his pals anywhere near my hoo-ha. There are limits, and I prefer black.

There are other things the K-Mart doesn't sell, and I found most of them, which was a pity, because I had plans to actually buy things. I did get M some socks. So when I got up to the cashier station I was delighted to find that I had one of those elderly and desperate cashiers, the ones you just know are raising 3 crack addicted grandchildren and still have weird cousin Joe Bob in the shed out back with the meth lab. This cashier had apparently been told that she must follow the K-Mart script and damn, follow it she would, down into hell and back, even as her customers stared at her blankly and thrust ripped packages of beanbag ashtrays into her hands.

Yeah. So, that was my evening. How was yours?

2 comments:

Edgy Mama said...

That is the best description of K-mart, and in particular, K-mart cashiers, that I've ever heard. You rock!

Edward said...

(Chocolate slut calling attention whore, do you read me?)

When that fancy new KMart opened on Brevard road, there was nervous talk that the Patton Ave one would close. I was in there around that time, and chatting with a sporting goods guy while he made me a key. He said that the Patton Ave store was the most profitable one in the Asheville area. Take that FWIW.