 |
| Courtesy of Wikipedia |
I wonder if Descartes would have thought it a worthy
enterprise to prove the existence of God had Costco existed in the 1600’s.
Amelia came home the other day after completing her third
year. We had a busy day ahead of us in
preparation for sneaking away for the weekend.
I dropped Suzanne off at her mother’s home, and then picked up Amelia at
the airport. From there the two of us
headed to Suzanne’s mother’s apartment to clean. Gloria has recently moved into a home and we
were tasked with the final cleanup at the old place.
Afterward we picked up Suzanne, headed to Westboro for a bit
of shopping then a couple of stops in the Market and over the bridge to Quebec. On the way home we had to do our monthly
penance and stop at COSTCO for a run of “the staples”.
I don’t know what exactly it was that I perpetrated in my
previous life that makes my penance in this one so devious, but it must have
been something egregiously horrible.
It was Friday at about 3:30pm in a government town. Awesome timing right? I can usually pre-judge my COSTCO experience
by the number of carts remaining in the cart queue. Once again, I am fully aware of how this
defeats the power of positive thinking but remember, I am but a few meager
steps into this journey of enlightenment.
At first blush it appears they have enough carts for the
whole metropolitan area of Ottawa/Hull to go joy riding through the aisles of
this archaic behemoth. I would estimate
the parking area for shopping carts to be somewhere around 5,000 square
feet. When we walked in the remaining
carts couldn’t have taken up more than 500 square feet. I knew immediately I needed to start
breathing deeply.
I’ve been to a lot of suspect places on this planet and I
have yet to discover a place where I am more ill suited. There is a long list of things that make this
so. Simple things, like the endless
chaotic wave of unruly people blindly pushing engorged carts ignorantly
about. If not running up the back of my
ankles with their four wheeled weapons, then in a fog of unawareness leaving
them in the middle of the aisle to impede my egress.
Nowhere is the sheer scope of the obscenity of first-world consumerism
better exemplified than at COSTCO. Skids
piled to ceiling height with product packaging on steroids, aggressively held
together with reams of plastic shrink-wrap and industrial cardboard are
everywhere. Aisle upon aisle of
pre-packaged process food designed to uncomplicated the lives of the masses
while keeping them on a dizzying chemical slide toward obesity. And oh, those poor individuals draped in
latex gloves, hats and body suits - distributing the ubiquitous free sample and
innocently causing my ankles to bear the brunt of yet another stainless steel
bear cage on wheels being deftly diverted toward the sickening wafting scent of
Chef Boyardee mac and cheese.
As you can see, I am an intimidated fish out of water in
this place and have a history of succumbing to the emotional aspects of the
experience.
I attempt to achieve some peace by entering into my own special
kind of Costco meditation. Unfortunately
for all concerned, this usually ends all too abruptly and long before we can
hit the exit doors, my patience diminishes.
To quote Robert Plant, “it’s nobody’s fault but mine”! I walk in bearing an optimistic attitude of
positivity, ready and willing to sustain this throughout all facets of the
adventure. Almost without exception
though, I lose focus coming down the home stretch and am abruptly jarred out of
the meditation. Then, my old patterns return
and my impatience, if we are lucky, cause only a few uncomfortable moments for
all of us, as I dictate a diversion toward the chaos that is the cash area.
By this time I am often figuratively curled into a fetal
ball of cynicism. This was indeed the
case the other day when Amelia and I found ourselves left alone in cart cue
hell, as Suzanne ran one last short distance sortie. In the head-spinning dizziness of the moment,
I scanned the area, glanced at the singular result of my procreation and in an exasperatingly
meek tone, muttered… “Humanity is fucked”!
Later however, as the cold light of day reinvigorated some
perspective, I once again realized that while COSTCO proves to me the razors
edge we, as a race, walk toward an imminently finite existence, that somehow we
can rise together as a collective consciousness and persevere.
Failing this, thank God COSTCO in Quebec sells those sixty packs
of beer for sixty bucks!
No comments:
Post a Comment