Walgreens
So there I was at Walgreens, breaking my promise for the hundredth time that I would never, never ever ever go into a Walgreens again. But the household needed Ice Melt and an extension cord and shit maybe some gum drops, the kind with little sugar crystals on the outside. Such a motley crew of items can only be purchased at a few unique locations. Walgreens being the closest and most consistently open. But damn, Walgreens, especially on cold winter nights, is a lunatic hangout, an open door asylum for zombies and the unattractive, unwanted and unwelcomed banshees that haunt the stores isles with their dried apricot faces and pickled postures. It’s like having a haunted house open in your neighborhood 365 days a year.

Unfortunately, I have a neighbor who is one of these people. She lives alone in the second story of a house owned by a sweet old women who watches television all day with headphones in her ears. I can see the old woman right now from my second story home-office window. My window looks right down into her living room. I can see the back of her silver head. She’s watching a morning news program. She’s there all day, just like I’m up here almost all day looking into my machine. The crazy lady who lives upstairs from the old woman takes her cigarette breaks outside and I swear she tries to time them at exactly the same time that I take mine. She mumbles things to herself and occasionally will break out in hysterical cackling laughter. It’s truly terrifying when she does this. She also spends an alarming amount of time grazing at Walgreens. The few times I’ve seen her there she is always transfixed on one thing. One product. I’ve witnessed her browsing an end cap forever. She’ll pick up and inspect one of the dozens, put it back and then move surgically to the next one. Repeating this until all have been inspected. Every so often she’ll cackle with excitement. It gives me chills just writing about it.

There are two places where standing in line as a costumer seem like time vortexes to me. One is the post office and the other is Walgreens. When in line at either of these places, I am overwhelmed with a sense of dread and am quickly filled with the urgency of my own existence. Sometimes the feeling is so strong that I simply drop all my goods and leave the store. Sometimes, I find it helps if I squish one of those candy bars in the check out lane or find anything else that I can break by simply crushing it in my hand and put it back without anyone noticing. Extremely therapeutic. We all have our coping strategies. And strategies you need for these checkout lines. You could be behind two people at Walgreens, each with two items to buy and it would still take you 20 minutes before it’s your turn to check out. Every conceivable problem that could go wrong between clerk and consumer does. It’s like the two are speaking entirely different languages to one another. Then there’s the transaction: expired coupons, coupon arguments, product too expensive, product undesired (‘Actually I don’t think I want that’), undesired product taken away and hence becomes desirable again (!?!), unknown cigarette brand, check writing, price check, price doesn’t exist. The list is infinite and the customer gets creative especially when they combine five or six of these in one seesion. The shit is just epic.

In a desperate move the other day, I bought an ice scraper for the car at Walgreens. It made four scrapes and then snapped in half like a dry twig. Gracefully, I swiveled Northwest on the ball of my right foot, then, in the direction of Walgreens, I did hurl one half of that piece of shit scraper as far as I could. I swear I will never, never ever ever go to Walgreens again.