I had to stop in the Dollar General last night on my way home from work. A while back I had bought the cats some cheap food from Big Lots. The cats hardly touched it. Even the stray cat that sneaks in for food was not touching it. Since the stray cat will eat anything, I took a closer look at the food. I realized the little smelly nodules were hard as a rock. The cats must have been breaking their teeth trying to chew this stuff.
I can't help but notice that some cat food seems to be oddly formed after the shapes you find on ESP cards.
The Dollar General ranks on the bottom of my personal hierarchy of closeout stores. They rank: Big Lots, The Dollar Store, and finally, Dollar General. I go to the dollar general when I am in my down-on-my-luck, nickels-in-my-pocket broke phase. The Dollar General next to my house is particularly foul. Once I went in there and there was a bored cop and a pissed off employee with tears welling up in her eyes. Apparently some guy had come in and brought some dollar general crap to the register and he apparently took offense and felt disrespected when he did not have enough money to pay for his stuff, so he solved this dilemma by reaching over and slapping the lady on the face and then running out with his goods. The bored expression on the cops face seemed to say that this was not an isolated incident.
So I wandered in, got the $1.50 box of ultra cheap cat food. Actually it was a kitten food, the box promising to be full of nourishing mothers milk and essential vitamins to accelerate the growth of the kitten. That probably means that my fat odd-eyed cat will double in size after eating a few mouthfuls. If that thing gets too big I'll have to buy a used circus tent and travel the old south, charging two bits a gander.
I stood in the 'line' near the checkout. You can hardly call it a line; proper lines do not form at this dollar general. Instead people sort of mob around the registers. Mothers are also there with their kids orbiting about them, and when it comes time for them to put their stuff on the checkout counter the kids all whirl off and reappear with candy bars in their hands that they eagerly plunk down next to their mothers stuff. This usually prompts an 'Oh no you don't!' followed by a chorus of whines and some private eye rolling by myself.
There was a lady in front of me with an enormous ass. It was almost mesmerizing by how freakishly large it was. The rest of her body was not really fat, and seemed to be evenly proportioned, but her ass simply exploded out of her backside like some sort of unholy growth. She was excitedly talking to her shopping companion and every now and then she would break out a couple of frenzied impromptu dance steps that had me backing up warily. In her arms she clutched five bottles of green rubbing alcohol. The smelly stuff that old men like to put on her feet. I fleetingly wondered if they had anything to do with her ass-maintenance.
I finally paid for my cheap food and wandered out. I peered in the next room over in the little strip mall were they are building something. There used to be an excellent Salvation Army store there filled with cast off goodies and ugly cheap furniture, but they closed it down several years ago and the place had stood empty ever since. However in the past week or so there had been some heavy construction going on in there, even replacing windows and what not. I tried to puzzle out what sort of store would go in there simply from the walls they were building, but no such luck. The wall outside smelled like pee.
My house was a little cold last night, so I ended up holing up in my bedroom with the heater and electric blanket and watching 'Star Trek Enterprise'. Apparently scifi recently bought the franchise and are now showing it on Monday nights in four-hour blocks. I liked the show when it first came out, but I never came up with it. Mainly because it was running on UPN and they never advertised the times it was playing, and then they moved it to Friday nights, the night I am usually out doing something. I never understood why UPN decided to pick up enterprise considering that UPN is an 'urban sitcom' station. The grungier dirtier cousin of the WB.
Anyways, I liked enterprise for entirely juvenile reasons, mainly that of the sexy Vulcan who works hard at keeping her roaring pits of sexual desire under control while finding herself in increasingly uncompromising situations with her crewmates. That's some good TV right there. I do not recall how many episodes I watched last night. I ended up drifting off to sleep. I had an entirely pointless dream that I was at some sort of outdoor rock concert and I could not buy beer because I did not have my student ID. The dream was spent with me wandering around trying to find my ID.
There was ice on my car this morning. It solidified into some interesting patterns on the roof of my car.
2026 Update
Dialing the time machine back 19 years to a Dollar General that smells of pee and poor decisions.
Ah, 2007. A simpler time when you had to physically enter a foul closeout store to be disappointed by rock-hard cat food, and the line wasn't a line but a mob of orbiting children and one mesmerizingly enormous ass. Now we have delivery apps that bring the same disappointment to your door for a subscription fee, plus a thirty-minute wait while a man in a hatchback argues about the address. You ranked Big Lots above Dollar General; today the entire hierarchy has merged into an endless gray corridor of the same cheaply made nothing, only now it's wrapped in 'luxury' language and called a 'dollar-plus experience.' And your beloved Star Trek Enterprise—that network is a ghost, and the sexy Vulcan is now a legacy character you can stream on a phone while ignoring actual Vulcans. The wall outside the old Salvation Army still smells like pee in my memory, but now the pee is probably geotagged and reviewed. At least your dream about needing a student ID to buy beer reminds me that identity verification has only gotten worse: now you need a phone, an app, a password, and a facial scan just to buy a light bulb.
“2007 Ed, when you watched the lady with five bottles of green rubbing alcohol dance her frenzied dance, did you ever stop to think that the universe was giving you a preview of your own future cat-food-buying habits, or were you too busy backing away?” — Beelzebubba the Third
2007 Ed: So, Beelzebubba, that's a fair question, and the answer is I was too busy backing away to notice any cosmic foreshadowing. My brain was stuck on the green rubbing alcohol and whether it was for her ass-maintenance, as I so delicately put it. But now that you mention it, yeah, the universe does have a sick sense of humor. Here I am, months later, standing in the same Dollar General, buying a box of kitten food that promises to accelerate growth like it's some kind of science experiment. My fat odd-eyed cat would probably double in size, and I'd be the one dancing a frenzied dance when the circus tent bill arrives. So no, I didn't see it coming, but I should've known. The universe loves a good punchline, and I'm usually the one holding the bag of rock-hard cat food.
