Introducing a new column here at drone alone: Life Sucks. Following in the glorious tradition of drone alone's best things ever and hamster hipness end of days, Life Sucks is a running commentary about the things that make me wish I were dead. Today's episode: My Soul, My Very Happiness, Crushed By Costco.
A rainy day, and cold. Huddled silhouettes of pedestrians scurry from cover to cover. Others carrying umbrellas skip across streaming gutters. On a Sunday afternoon the parking lot bustles with activity. Suburban Ussault Vehicles (SUVs) jostle for postion. They park inappropriately, block traffic, span two spaces.
Blue collar families shop for this weeks groceries. Women push the carts, pointing at things to stoic husbands. The men say little and keep their arms folded across the tops or their bellies, their bills pulled low over their eyes. Occasionally they stroke their goatees.
I'm in the electronics section studying High Definition Television (HDTV). This is my ritual, my time for quiet contemplation. Every time into Costco I make the short pilgrimage from the front door to the welcoming glow of the televisions, rows of them, giant and crystal clear. I try to decipher the nuances of picture quality between the brands. I imagine which one I would take home with me, which one I would have displayed in my living room. If spent two months salary on a television would that make me a bad person? Would I go straight to hell?
Near by is another fantasy. On sale for two thousand is an arcade-style machine that plays fifty-six of the oldest of the old school video games. Asteroids, Robotron, Space Invaders, Galaga. The machine is never in the same spot but always with the same Chinese boy at the controls, mashing the buttons. "Anklebiter," Mitch calls him.
I pass the Christmas decorations. Life-size nutcrackers guard an aisle of animatronic polar bears and Santas. As they sing carols their plush bodies wiggle and vibrate.
In the clothing section I stop dead in my tracks. Resplendant in the cold, mercury halide light is a rack of black blazers. I try on a Medium and luxuriate in its supple velvet. It's so comfortable I want to wear it out of the store. And at sixty dollars this, unlike Plasma television or an all-in-one Arcade, is a fantasy I can fulfill. Except the Medium doesn't fit. I lack the girth to fill out the middle. My arms are an inch too short. I search the entire rack, from one end to the other, one garment at a time, for a Small. Not until I reach the end do I see the sign that reads: Velvet Blazers sizes M-XXL.
I shiver. I feel ill. Suddenly I am alone, bereft, cast aside because I am of the few Americans not plauged by obesity. All my dreams of lounging in overstuffed armchairs, smoking a cigar, savoring a snifter of brandy, vanquished. Never shall I be accepted amoung the Velvet-wearing Elite, doomed by my slight frame to blindly wander the wasteland of ordinary fabric.
Dispair.
