How to Shop at Wal-Mart with the Voice in your Head

Look, there’s an American flag and sunbeams! How can that be bad?

How many people like to shop at Wal-Mart?  Show of hands!  Yeah, I thought so.  I know there are many lib’rals who would look down at me for shopping at Wal-Mart because they are, like, the Antichrist, but until there are more lib’ral shopping centers that offer prices that people in small towns can afford, they can shut the heck up. And this is coming from a lib’ral.  She happens to be a cheap lib’ral.  Cause she’s poor.  Good reason to be cheap.

Anyway, so we’re shopping at Wal-Mart (I know you do it when no one is looking you cannot resist that price on laundry detergent have you ever seen it so cheap I mean surely they don’t have the sweat shop children make laundry detergent, right???) which should be a simple thing to do. I mean, they have everything.  When you’re created by Satan, it’s easy to offer all variety of goods at discount prices.

Worship Evil.

But it’s not so simple when you have the voice in your head.  No, it’s not the kind of voice that tells me to jump off a cliff or go murder someone or just scream very loudly at nothing in particular or dance around like a toddler in a tutu.  This voice is just a big jerk.  It’s like Sad Pony when he’s really on his naughty sarcastic streak.  The big, heavy, obnoxious pony who sits in my head and smarts off while I’m shopping.  This is fun when to do while looking at ads for 1940s laxatives, but not so much when I’m trying to buy groceries.

Here’s an example.  I am shopping for food.  I’d like to be healthy, yet cheap, and also I’m rather picky (I do not like veggies.  Veggies are for communists. But I try to eat some anyway.)  So I think, hey, fruit is sweet but it’s good for you. Better than a candy bar anyway.  Fruit it is.  And so I’m looking at grapes and there goes Sad Pony.

You remember what happened the last time you bought grapes?

I kept forgetting to eat them and they turned into shriveled prune things that sat in the fridge so long they started to become sentient.

Right. You wasted food. Shame, Alice.  You know there are starving children and ponies in other countries, right?

I’d send them my grapes if I could.

Ha that was so not funny.  Don’t buy the grapes.

But they are healthy. I’ll eat them this time.

No you won’t.  You suck, Alice.

This is basically how it goes, in my head. And God forbid there be the choice of more than one kind of grape.  Thing Two was once convinced that green grapes were the boys and purple grapes were the girls, or vice versa.  I usually get the purple because I like them better, so more than likely the green ones are better for me.  I don’t know.  At least there are, generally, only a few types of grapes.

Not like shampoo.  Dear God, have you shopped for shampoo lately?  Normally I go for cheap shampoo which means White Rain or Suave which you can get for less than a dollar sometimes.  Or the knock off brand of Head and Shoulders, cause you know I’m a total flake. You can get this for a dollar too, if you shop at the Dollar Tree where everything’s a dollar, though it’s fun occasionally to ask them how much stuff costs.  Don’t try it too often, though, or they might, justifiably, stab you to death with one of their .99 kitchen knives.

Hmm, I’m gonna ask the nice young man how much this card is, Mertle.

Today was different, though, because I have a newly minted teenager with hair from Hades.  I would complain more, but I’m fairly certain she inherited that thick, unruly mess from yours truly.  She’s been having trouble with tangles, by which I mean she has this enormous bird’s nest on the back of her head.  She’s going to read this and then write about it later in her tell all book.  I’ll be so proud. Anyway, someone told me that there was a special shampoo called “straightening” shampoo, that could knock out frizz and help with tangles.

I was all up in that stuff. So I decided to search for this shampoo.  They had it.  In about a thousand different brands.  I looked down both aisles for the first time in a while, since generally I head right for the .98 cent Suave (green apple!) and I’m out of there.  And Holy Crap there are so many different brands of shampoos and conditioners and gels and sprays, and each brand has at least ten different varieties, and each variety has ten different varieties of that variety, and so on.  My brain nearly exploded.  Clean up on Aisle 4.

They have to be freaking KIDDING me.

So I wandered up, and down, and up and down picking up different products and reading the back labels.  From what I could tell, all of them were supposed to do the same thing for prices ranging from around three dollars to almost fifteen. Control frizz.  But how exactly were these shampoos supposed to do this?  What bizarre sort of chemicals were in these things? Did sweat shop children work in chemical factories creating shampoos all day so that my thirteen-year-old can have sleek, shiny hair?  Or at least hair that doesn’t balloon out like a 1970s afro, which is kind of odd on a little white girl?

I didn’t know, and I still don’t.  It would not surprise me if these hair product companies are fibbing just a bit and they all have exactly the same cleaning agents in them, and you’d do about as well just scrubbing your head with a bar of cheap Ivory soap.  But this was my child, and you know you do what’s best for your child, which is having her finally brush her hair before you lose your mind.  So I figured I’d cover all my bases.  I found Head and Shoulders shampoo with the anti-frizz crap in it and then some Vidal Sassoon (if she doesn’t look good, I don’t look good) cream junk to smear on it then comb out.  We are going to tackle this monster, by golly, or my name isn’t Alice.

Your name isn’t really Alice.

Oh, shut up, pony!

After I’d made my decision, I went and I got my groceries.  It was hard.  I wanted to drop my cart and run because suddenly Squirrel had decided to take up residence and he was all excited to get home and didn’t want to shop anymore or spend money he wanted to go home, but I shut him up too by dropping some groceries in the cart.  Boom!  Okay, a lunch item down.  Boom, there’s my weekly diet of sugary cola – maybe I dropped that a little too hard.  Boom, some fruit in little squeeze pouches that are really for small children but taste good, do not require spoons, and do not go bad like apples do.  Score.  Boom!  Before long, I was done and heading for the 20 items or less aisle.  A minute later a guy came up behind me with a newspaper.  I could have let him go first.  Pfft, yeah right.  No way, buddy.  I was done and OUT of there!

It wasn’t till I got home I remembered I forgot to go by and pick up my prescription.  Again.  Crap in a hat.