ARMAGEDDON AT THE WALMART MCDONALDS

To quote the late, great Van Morrison � �Have I told you lately that I love you?�

No???

Look � I love you guys. Bunches and bunches and bunches and bunches.

But if I get one more email wanting to trade discs with me � I may have to slap some Kung Fu moves on somebody�s ass.

And don�t THINK I can�t do it. Ohhh�I can do it alright. I can do the �HIIII-YAHHH� kicks and everything.

I�m down like that.

I had a feeling when I offered to trade discs yesterday that there was a chance I could be in over my head.

Because�let�s face it � who DOESN�T want a copy of Diaryland Ass Shakers, Vol. I???

Everybody wants it! It�s the ultimate party disc, guaranteed to leave your ass half-shaken off your body. It�s deadly that way. It is�dare I say it � the mack daddy of all ass-shakers.

I�ve got over 40 people now wanting a copy of the disc which means this disc will find its way into more homes than Michael Jackson�s last effort.

So for the time being, if you didn�t read yesterday�s entry yesterday and plan on reading it today�do NOT send me an email wanting to trade CDs until I get some sort of order going for the people who already emailed me.

Yeah.

All that.

Oh�and Jodie�Jodie the one who emailed me yesterday with the �special� offer for her CD� your email address didn�t work � it came back to me twice. Send me another email � I�m interested in your offer for a trade and will take you up on it, for sure!

Oh get yer minds out of the gutter, ya buncha nosey ninnies! She offered to make the CD booklet for the disc�NOT send naked pics! Gahhhh!! You people read too much into everything!

So last night, I want to go out to the new house to make sure that the electrician has been there and wired everything properly.

I get home about 5:15 after work and wait for the wife to get home.

By the way...the wife KNOWS that we are going out to the house. We decided to do this 24 hours earlier.

It's her turn to pick Andrew up from daycare. She's back to being about 95% after her terrible bout with the chest cold from hell. She still coughs occasionally, but it doesn't sound like warplanes dropping H-bombs every time she does it.

She's usually home about 5:45.

(I'm setting the picture here)

6:00 .... she's not home.

6:15....not home.

6:30 ... she comes strolling in the door with the baby in her arms, whistling a happy tune. Okay...she can't whistle. She was singing a happy tune. She can't sing either, but that minor detail has never stopped her from trying.

"Are you ready to go see the house?" she said.

"Ever since 5:45," I said, really sarcastically. Dripping with sarcasm, I was.

"Well, then...let's go!" she says in her little sing-song voice, just oozing with chirpiness.

For some reason...now I'm in a bad mood. I should be used to this. She's never been on time for anything in 16 years. The woman will be late to her own funeral. I've come to accept this for the most part, but last night it kinda rubbed me the wrong way.

So the three of us pile in the van and she announces that we have to go to the post office first.

I point out that the post office is about four miles off the beaten path. From our apartment to the new house, it's a straight shot. Going to the post office is a four mile detour one way.

"Well, I'm sorry," she says. "I was going to stop there on the way home, but Heaven forbid I get home late. You would have jumped my ass."

This is the part where I almost swallowed my tongue. She was 45 minutes late. What in the hell could she have been doing for those 45 minutes?

We go to the post office because she had bills to pay. She's in the post office for ten minutes. She probably wanted to regale the guy behind the counter with one of her thrilling stories about how much she hates her boss. That's my guess anyway.

So then she gets back in the van and announces "While we're over in this neighborhood, let's stop by Walmart real quick."

I know my wife. She has no clue what the phrase "real quick" means. She thinks it means "for less than six hours".

She had to get pastries and fruit and juices for some meeting at work this morning. She hates her boss, she hates her job, she hates the place she works ... but she gives them 110%. This blows my mind. There have only been a few jobs that I have truly hated in life. I stayed there less than a month.

She's been at her job for eight years.

So we get her breakfast stuff and I decide that I need some of my diabetic ice cream treats that are yummier than that non-diabetic real ice cream crap.

There's one box left. I nab it like a man possessed and put it in the cart.

Then...because it's Walmart, there's always one more thing that comes to mind that we need ... blank videotapes.

So we go back to the video department. I'm just going to grab the first big block of blank videotapes I see and we're done.

I get in the videotape aisle and there's one woman in the aisle.

I say "Excuse me" because she's basically standing aimlessly in the middle of the aisle like most morons do at Walmart. Her cart is all willy-nilly in the aisle at an angle that won't let people pass. Like she's the guardian of the blank videotapes or some shit.

She pulls her mental finger out of her mental ass and says "Oh." Then she moves her cart slowly so that we can pass by.

Susie squeals. Naturally, I think she's stepped barefoot on a rusty nail.

Susie knows this ignorant aisle-hogger. They attended some classes together about a year ago. Some of you may remember last fall when I thought my wife was out crack whoring and she was really going to some classes to be better at her job (the one she gives 110% to who reward her with no raises or bonuses while everyone else got one).

So they start gabbing away. Andrew's getting restless in the cart, so I take him out of the cart and put him on the floor.

And. He's. Gone.

So I go chasing off Andrew. I know what he's looking for...the children's aisle of videotapes. The kid loves to look at all the boxes with all his favorite TV characters on them.

We get to his aisle and he starts taking videos off the shelf and turning them around in his little hands, inspecting each box and sucking in every single picture on the box. Then he throws that video to the floor and picks up another one and does the same thing.

Meanwhile, it's my job to make sure that when he throws these videos to the ground that he doesn't do it with such force that they break. The last thing I need is to be strong armed by some Walmart employee to buy a cart full of broken videos.

We do this for about 15 minutes, go back and Susie and Aisle-Guarder are still babbling about classes they took a year ago.

I mention that we have to be going. Susie wraps up her little tete-a-tete and we leave. Aisle-Guarder moves her cart so that she once again has the entire aisle blocked and goes back to staring at the blank videotapes, looking like one of those Children of the Corn.

We get to the checkout lane and I announce that Andrew and I are going over to the McDonalds inside the Walmart to get him a Happy Meal to eat on the way to the house so he's not starving, since it's now about 7:15.

We go and get in line. There's two people ahead of us.

The lady at the counter must be ordering for an entire community. She's got order after order after order that she's laying on the kid behind the counter.

The kid behind the counter...maybe I'm old....fine...I'm old....but this kid looked like he was about seven years old.

This kid was perhaps the absolute slowest, dumbest kid I've ever seen working in a fast food restaurant in my life.

He took the woman's order after she finally finished it ... then set about to make the order.

Taking his SWEET ASSED TIME doing it.

He loaded up the french fry basket and dropped it in.

He emptied some goo into the shake machine.

He slaughtered a couple of stray dogs with a butcher knife to scrape out some innards to throw on the grill for the hamburgers.

There were three other employees behind the counter. I think they were making a drug deal or something, I'm not exactly sure. All I know is that they weren't working ... they had little Timmy at the counter doing all the grunt work.

And Timmy was just aimlessly shuffling around in circles, not really knowing if he was supposed to ring up orders or take out the trash. I don't even think he knew where he was. Timmy was flying high on some X or something.

He would take the orders, make the orders and instead of taking the NEXT order, he'd wait for that first order to be finished, bag it up, hand it to the woman THEN move on to the next order.

Luckily, the next order was for a soft drink and that was it. I can't believe this idiot waited ten minutes for a soft drink. There's a whole row of machines full of every carbonated beverage imaginable ten feet away ... this guy waited ten minutes for a Coke.

My turn.

"I need a hamburger Happy Meal with a Vanilla Shake" I say.

"$4.12" little Timmy says after about 30 minutes of fumbling with his little colorful cash register.

I hand the kid a 20.

He hands me change for a 10. A five and some change.

"I gave you a 20," I said.

"Huh?" Little Timmy says.

"I handed you a 20 dollar bill," I repeated. "You gave me change for a 10."

I showed him the five dollar bill and change in my hand. This wasn't a magic trick. I hadn't even closed up my fist since he handed me the money. It was all right there.

Suddenly, it's Armageddon in the Walmart McDonald's.

"Cheryl?" Little Timmy says. "Can you come here a second?"

Cheryl snorts something out of her extra-long pinky fingernail, grumbles the words "motherfucker" several times under her breath and shuffles slowly over to the counter.

"This guy says he gave me a 20 dollar bill and I only gave him change for a ten dollar bill and I don't know what to do."

Common sense would dictate that the stupid little bastard just hand me a ten dollar bill, a hamburger happy meal and a vanilla shake and I would never make the mistake of thinking I could get a fucking happy meal in less than three hours here again.

Naturally, all common sense went skedaddling out the window the moment my big ass+ walked in the place.

"Open up the register and give him a ten dollar bill," Cheryl says lazily. Obviously, I could have said I handed him a $1,500 bill and Cheryl would have managed to find a calculator wedged up her ass and tell Timmy to give me $1,490 because she couldn't give two shits about the situation. It wasn't her money, she had her drugs, she was happy.

Timmy gives me a ten dollar bill after wrestling with the cash register for 20 minutes and finally making it submit to a figure four leglock.

He then throws some stray dog intestines on the grill and starts frying my burger himself while the long line of people behind me sighs. Like....how dare I come to a McDonald's and order a hamburger of all things. What am I .... a shit for brains?

Timmy finally tosses the Happy Meal together and hands it to me. It is now 7:40.

I'm livid at this point. I think it's because I pride myself for my punctuality. Perhaps I take too much pride in being punctual. Maybe it's time I stopped wearing that large button on the lapels of my shirts that says "I'm one punctual son of a bitch" everywhere I go.

Yet ... everyone around me is slow. And it's causing me undue stress.

Hell if I know.

We FINALLY get out to the house and it's been wired for electricity. Mattie Gee's house is being bricked. Our whirlpool tub is in the proper place and I'm so happy that my nipples are about to explode.

We get back in the car and it dawns on me that my ice cream has now been out of the freezer section of Walmart for well over an hour.

I panic. Sure...it's only $3.36 down the drain if everything has melted into sugarless piles of frozen milk substitute.

Still...I panic.

So I'm rushing home as fast as I can.

We get back to the apartment and naturally, Pokey Hopalong...otherwise known as my wife ... is taking her sweet assed time getting the baby out of his car seat.

"What are you looking at?" she's saying. "Do you see a bird? A birrrrrd? Is that a birrrrrrd? Do you see a birrrrrrrd??"

...You know....trying to get him to say "bird". Like all of a sudden, the kid's going to blurt out "It's a fucking Bluejay, Mom. A bluuuuuuue jaaaaaaaay."

...Meanwhile....my ice cream products are on the other side of my wife who's temporarily paralyzed and can't stop repeating the word "birrrrrrrrrrrrrrd".

I say "Excuse me" real huffily and grab the ice cream and sprint toward the apartment door.

I open the door and am greeted by my gassy mutt who thinks I've brought her a treat and is about to knock me over in order to get to whatever I have in my hand.

I maneuver around her and yank the box out of the bag.

It's warm.

I shove it in the freezer and pray to God. I ask for his forgiveness for my being an ass who takes way too much pride in being punctual and ask that he please....PLEASE refreeze my tasty ice cream treats and allow me the luxury of being able to enjoy a scrumptious vanilla sundae cone.

He scoffs at me.

SCOFFS I'm tellin' ya.

Now you see why my life is shit.