Maybe they should just rename it, SmellMart

I am back. I have found a renewed voice. All it took was some inspiration.....a trip to a WalMart. It was no ordinary WalMart but the one closest to me in the most convuluted of ways. It was an old Woolworth store in an older part of the city that is normally foreign to me. I am such a snob, but it is true. It is a blue collar area that may have become very ethnic but I have not got a clue to the ethnicity around here. I will say, once again, that is an ethnicity that obviously cannot smell itself, because there was a pungent (I am trying to be diplomatic) odor in the air.

This particular WalMart is rather close to my home, but it entails taking the back routes. These back routes, through industrial properties, is really quick but like traveling through a wormhole in space and ending up in another universe (that I would not have known existed). This strip mall has a pawn shop, Blockbuster Video and Beer Store, so how bad can it be? Pretty bad, but it is close. I had to deal with some traffic and did get some good tunes that kept me in reflection mode ("Blue Monday" by New Order and "You Dropped the Bomb on Me" by The Gap Band, good tunes of the early to mid '80s).

I get into the store and have to get some shit. Oddly enough, spinach was not among the things I wanted or needed. Anyway, I needed some Halloween candy and was wandering into an aisle when two women, together, took up both ends of the aisle. I was pissed as it was a bit obtuse. I mean, ladies, are you the only fucking people in the store? Then act like there are others around. Then I espied that one of these ladies had on a fanny pack. I was going to ask how that was working out for her. Fucking fanny packs, what is up those. I always see Adam Glaser, aka Seymour Butts, on Family Business wearing one with his muscle shirts. The dude has no fashion sense but he is in Southern California, making a bunch of money shooting porn (anal, ass to mouth and squirters being his genres of choice) so if that is the price one must pay, it is a small one.

From fanny packs, I go to combovers. I got to Mayfair and got to see an old dude fogging up the joint with hair spray. He was spraying his head so that he could combover his bald spot and the hair will stay. We all have to breath his toxic fumes so he can maintain the charade of having a full head of hair. The dude has to be in his 70s. Give up the ghost, man. It is gone and it ain't coming back. You can have your fucking vanity, but I should, nor anybody else, should have to breath it. If he were using Ron Popeil's Hair in a Can (GLH) it would be different. Then again, that was really spray paint with fibres in it. You painted over your bald spot and the fibres made it look like it was hair-ish. Given my recollection of the informercial, it was definitely more "ish" than hair.

Back to WalMart. I am waiting in line to pay for my purchases. Fuck, I hate queueing up, but queue up I did. I am next in line, when from behind, my nose is assaulted by a pungent, fuck that, a stink so heinous my eyes started to water. I looked behind me, half expecting to find Stinky Guy (he would have been out of place with his BMW, though). Then again, you don't have to cash, or credit, to stink to high hell (low hell, either). It did make me want to speed up the checkout that much more, though. I paid and stepped out into the fresh air. Life was good again.

I did actually look around the store this time. Big mistake. I said it was an old Woolworth's store. It is in a mature part of the city. It is fucking dingy and run down. It is a depressing way to shop, I have to say. I think next time I have to make the drive to the Stockyards. Then again, this time of year, in the past, was always punctuated by a trip by the Stockyards (when they were the Stockyards and cattle was loaded, slaughtered and processed at the meat packing plants that dotted the area. It has since been rezoned as residential and just a few of the meat packers remain, but the cattle train no longer stops there. My father seemed to enjoy driving us from synagogue on the High Holidays in the warm to hot temperatures, just so we got a whiff of the animal stench. That smell of impending death and cow shit, which is the only way to explain it.

Well, there you have it real smells, memories of smells (call President's Choice, I have a new sauce for them Memories of the Stockyards in September, great with beef, but it does stink but it is an earthy and organic stink--death and shit, not quite sex and candy), New Order and fanny packs, that is quite a week. Great long weekends to you all! Ciao!