I Hate Shopping

This may be a little off-topic for a music blog, but....

Why do big-box retail stores seem so post-apocalyptic? Upon entering Target or Fred Meyer or whatever, one is always faced with a deluge of zombie-sloth-people caught up in a slow-motion feeding frenzy. Luckily (but disappointingly) it's not brains they are eating. Instead it's carbohydrates, cheap plastic, soda. There are signs of plenty all around, food everywhere, cheap goods, bright colors, but it feels more like a nuclear bomb went off and left a sky made of fluorescent lighting and trees made of polyester. Left with no natural sunlight, no animals, and no plants, the inhabitants of this bitter landscape survive on food that looks like plastic that can be easily cooked in contraptions made of plastic that look not so different than the food itself. The labyrinthine aisles lead the brainless on a quest to satiate some oblique desire to find the perfect combination of products, an act seeking to fill the hole left in their instinctual pattern of survival before the apocalyptic blast. I like to fantasize in these places that I am among the last surviving sane humans, hiding in plain view while trying to find others like myself so that we can form an alliance to recapture the world from the infected. But the harsh reality of it hits me when I'm standing in the checkout line, paying money to join the ranks of the depraved. Standing in that line, staring at your soon-to-be-landfilled merchandise should be a more egregious act than we make it out to be. We are choosing THIS over everything else, and forming the future around this bullshit. We could all be running around naked and beautiful in fields of poppies, hunting lions and building bad ass huts and shit. But somehow we've opted for zombyism. WHAT THE FUCK?