My trips to Wal-Mart are infrequent enough to allow me, mercifully, to forget how much I hate it there, but once I hit the parking lot it all comes flooding back. As soon as you walk in the door you enter what I like to call the tackysphere. Under the pitiless buzzing fluorescents, endless aisles of wretched crap are illuminated for the robotic pawing of bargain-hunting families. Solo shopping is discouraged at Wal-Mart, apparently, it's always sallow, sad-looking trailer trash couples (he sporting an unironic mullet, she a babydoll top with cigarette burns) or families. These families, all dressed in sweatpants or matching jogging outfits chosen for their lack of binding, flesh-constricting seams, are seemingly required by statute to include running children, hyperactive, sugar-addled kids who make a sport of running around and shrieking to one another at the tops of their lungs, hiding from their comrades behind picked-over tables of mysteriously-branded jeans that are guaranteed to literally dissolve in the first washing.

At the checkout there's always, always some kind of problem. A belligerent perspiring woman in a motorized cart has some kind of beef, a coupon is disallowed and squabbled over, what have you. You stand and stare out the window wistfully, at the great world beyond the vast parking lot, like an astronaut looking at Earth so far away, and you wonder what would happen if you just simply let it go and crapped your pants right there in line. Would anyone at Wal-Mart even notice?