I work a white collar, well-paying job that meets most of needs and may lead to a reasonable amount of comfort in the near future. Yard/house/wife/kids/sports-car/midlife crisis ambition aside, and a means to obtain it aside, I currently sublet a room in a stranger’s apartment, drive a mid-90’s compact car, and thrift-shop my professional wardrobe. My casual clothes are a mildly pleasant combination of hold-overs from the turn of the millennia and whatever my girlfriend chooses my hindquarters should be swaddled in.
Frankly, I blame this on the area in which I live. I’m in a suburb of Washington, DC, close enough to walk to a Metro station. Everything is at a premium. A reasonable salary, which would sustain a family of four in most of the country, means that, here, you just get by. For example, I heard a girl I know complaining about how hard it was to live off her $66,630/year. A few years ago, I would have laid into her about being grateful, but, having lived here, I bit my tongue into slivers and minded my business.
As in keeping with some of my lie, I typically go to Target instead of Walmart, and almost never find myself in a Big Lots or Kmart. At Target, I can drink an overpriced coffee, look at shiny new crap I don’t need, and interact with people who don’t force me to ponder the American class struggle.
The problem with going to Target is that, along with all the pretense, almost all the utility has also been removed. Target caters to people who will never really have to lift much of a finger, except to pursue sport. This means that everything comes as part of kits or in styles that require little effort. It’s like someone went down a checklist and removed anything that involved a saw, hammer, or technical skill.
Tonight, I needed drapery hooks. The curtains over the sliding glass door needed re-hanging and were made to be pierced by little sharp bits of steel. So, off to Target I took my little meep-mobile, in the rain, wearing my trench-style outer coat, with the intent to get in, buy shiny bits, and roll home to fix someone else’s window coverings… maybe buy some Starbucks as a reward for leaving my room.
I wandered. I sipped. I failed. Target had nothing even remotely similar to what I wanted, leaving me standing in a long coat, beard, and rumpled expression, in a store mostly populated with 30-something professiona-frau’s who quickly and pointedly ignored me when they passed. I don’t blame them. I am not compatible with their yoga pants.
So off to Kmart in the rain, radio blaring about Boston cops as they caught their second suspect in the Boston Marathon bombing, through the mildly emptied streets. Strangely enough, it was very easy to find exactly what I wanted, once there. I needed no help, and everything was clearly marked. I was in and out within 10 minutes and only had to listen to a bit of noise from a seemingly elderly sales clerk, whose teeth and common sense seemed to be missing, but was simply running about saying “Sir?” while searching for the man she had been helping.
Things I noticed:
I was the only seemingly partially-Germanic person there. That means nothing specifically, but it may inform the next things I noticed.
I was the only person using a debit card. Paying with cash or rebate seems to be the preferred method for the other people there. They seemed to have some sort of phone number based store credit account, and wads of cash, like I used to carry in my blue collar days. Hard to get in the hole if you can’t spend what you don’t have. Hard to be traced if you don’t use a bank account.
While I still didn’t fit, the people around me were quite pleasant. All of them. No snot, little pretense, and only one whiff of odeur de merde de l’enfant.
I should explain further. I look like a pudgy rectangle wrapped in a t-shirt and a trench coat.
It doesn’t seem to matter where I go, it’s the same situation: conspicuous at 1500 ft.
I guess what I really noticed today was that I might never fit in, but there are places I can go where I won’t be edged away from quite as openly. In the end, isn’t that what we really want?
Or maybe this just a bunch of boring junk that happened. Meh. I’mma gonna go make me a sammich.
~The Crow Drinker.
P.S.
While in line, I picked up a $5 DVD set entitled Fright Fest, which included some of the worst horror films ever committed (and some of their sequels). 12 movies in all, but including one of the stupidest cheese fests ever: Jack Frost 2. I especially enjoy the fight, in the survival raft, over the carrot, which then washes up on a tropical island and waggles like a rubber phallus in the sand at coeds around a campfire… then supernatural ice cycle murder. Let me just say “Bwah ha. Bwah ha ha ha.”
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