Wal-Mart And The Space-Time Continuum

When I get tired of my earthly surroundings, bound by the laws of space and time, I go to Wal-Mart. It's a whole other dimension, an other-worldly Twilight Zone from which, paradoxically, eventually all my worldly possessions will come.

They built one near me not long ago and I was as happy as if they'd constructed a heaven in my neighbourhood. I flocked there immediately just to gambol about, ignoring the No Spring Lambs signs. I don't know what it is about that place that brings such joy to human beings. It's just a store, after all, one would think. But no. A thousand times no, marked down to fifty.

First of all, it's way bigger than other stores. If you ask where something is, they tell you in longitude and latitude. You've got your electronics in one hemisphere, household items in another, and a whole separate solar system for clothes. Intrepid pioneering explorers set off for unbraved Wal-Martian frontiers, armed with only a cart and a cartographer, braving monsters and perils unknown in far-flung uncharted aisles. Magellan would've loved Wal-Mart.

And you lose all sense of time once those doors whoosh closed behind you. You think you're going to dash in and out with a couple of vital items but before long you're wandering about in a dazed Dawn Of The Dead shop-till-you-drop trance, towing a heaping train of items, and when you finally emerge, blinking bewilderedly, into daylight, you're no longer dressed for the season. It's like a casino in there, only the odds are better that you'll come out with something.

Because they have everything. All imaginable products are available under the vast horizon of their roof. That's why you can't go to Wal-Mart without spending at least a hundred bucks. It's an immutable law of nature. It's impossible drop double-digit dollars. To save time, I've taken to just running up and flinging a hundred bucks in the front door. You always see something you never thought of buying, at such a good price that you can't afford not to. (Things that are ten dollars everywhere else are a nickel a dozen at Wal-Mart. We all know the secret of their astonishingly low costs, but we won't get into that here for fear of upsetting the child labour sweatshop bleeding hearts.)

Last time I was there, I purchased, although I am a man, a device that sprays lovely odours into the room. I had hitherto been unable to imagine a scent more delightful than, say, old pizza boxes, but somehow this odour-spritzing machine caught my eye and I just had to have it. It was only twenty ducats, and it dispenses a whiff of perfume with a hilarious sneezing sound that reduces my children and I to helpless gales of laughter every time we hear it, because my kids are immature and I follow their lead. It provides 2400 sprays before you have to replace the aerosol can and we've already had 24 million laughs over it, and my divorced-bachelor pad no longer reeks of Eau De Je Ne Sais Pas. I am as pleased with this new acquisition as if a Britney Spears-making machine had been installed in my livingroom, and it's the kind of thing I would only buy at Wal-Mart.

And it's the same with food. I now shop for my groceries there, too, and I never fail to bring home delicacies that I have never in my life picked up at any grocery store. Last time I came home with a big bag of presliced Thai chicken strips for salad and some feta cheese bites on toothpicks and pickled trout morsels in a jar and all manner of succulence that they didn't have at So Frills. AND a gen-u-ine sheepfleece feather duster to boot! Plus a can of, get this, Spider 'Blaster'. They know how to name things enticingly at Wal-Mart. I might have passed up spider 'spray' but who could miss a chance to BLAST the creepy freaks? Now when I see anything that has more than four legs, I shout, "Fetch me my blaster, boys!" and soon I am contentedly blasting away, subjugating all of Nature to my chemical will. No wonder shopping at Wal-Mart is such a blast.

So if you're having trouble finding me, it's because I used to be of this world but now I am at Wal-Mart. Try searching at forty degrees east by eighty degrees north. In the blisswares section.