walmart

CANADIAN CLUB—an appropriate response to a day at the PNE

We bears had the house to ourselves all day yesterday. Meanwhile my parents were observing carny people—not just the blue-shirted PNE ride operators, but other, more interesting people, squeezed into all sorts of unfortunate outfits, bouncing along feeding themselves corndogs. My mum saw a woman with four nipples, arbitrarily arranged beneath a stretched-to-the-limit-of-physics tanktop. And when she took the girls to the bathroom she met a new mother dressed as a stripper.

Needless to say, they had an awesome day, although they spent a great deal of our alcohol funds on PNE-priced items such as, well water, at $3.50 for a half-litre bottle.

Now who needs water?

The only time we really need water is when we buy CANADIAN CLUB instead of CROWN ROYAL. Which we did out of curiosity today. We had just chastised my dad for buying—at the PNE—a pan-flutist’s CD for $20, which was ultimately my mother’s fault because she spent 15 minutes coursing through the PNE prize home while my dad waited on a bench being wooed by the pan flute. My mother heard it too; he was playing “Unchained Melody,” and the teenagers behind her were grasping for the artist. “The Righteous Brothers,” my mother said, which they either ignored or didn’t recognize, then the girl told her boyfriend she was sure she’d heard her mom playing that song, which netted her some noises of disgust. And she added, she would never have a white kitchen, although the wine rack beneath the deer’s head was pretty dope.

My mother didn’t mean to buy CANADIAN CLUB today, but the liquor store is right beside the bank, where she had to go to spread a small cheque between two separate accounts to cover such liquor-unfriendly things as her gym membership and the car insurance. She was trying to be nice by buying a cheap mickey of rye so she could sip something guilt-free instead of getting into the more expensive CAOL ILA 12 my dad brought back from Vegas. She was trying to do a good thing, but you have to admit she just ended up looking like an alcoholic, especially when the mickey fell out of her gym bag at Steve Nash Fitness World.

I’ve come to the defense of CANADIAN CLUB many times, especially since it’s typically pitted against fit-for-royalty CROWN ROYAL, which is a nice, smooth rye. If you order a rye ‘n’ seven at the bar, the bartender will usually try to pass off CANADIAN CLUB on you for economy’s sake. And with 7-Up or gingerale, this is perfectly reasonable. CANADIAN CLUB is plenty rough compared to CROWN ROYAL, but who cares when you’re mixing it with pop? Neat, or even over ice, it’s a different story.

When I drink CANADIAN CLUB, I feel like a ruminant. I can taste grass and hay, along with some jagged alcohol, which I like. What it lacks in nuance it makes up for in straightforwardness. With a sweet, fizzy mixer, I actually prefer the rougher-edged CANADIAN CLUB; it asserts itself better, and the pop hides its earthier tones.

If I were a cow, like the one the kids observed giving birth at the PNE, I’d wonder what the hell humans were doing with grains, making things like CANADIAN CLUB. I’d also wonder why there was a set of crowded bleachers right beside me while a farmer stuck his whole arm inside me, tied a rope around my calf’s leg and yanked it out. (Miss P and Miss V did enjoy the whole business, but they thought it took too long.)

There are a lot of weird things at the PNE. It makes Walmart seem downright sedate, and apparently it takes a lot of energy to spend 10 hours there with a four-year-old and a six-year-old. I’m delighted it drove my mother to drink, even if it was just CANADIAN CLUB.

Hairier than any of us bears—and REAL!

My Fellow Inebriates,

Unexpectedly the kids were invited out for a playdate yesterday, leaving my parents with an afternoon to themselves. This struck me as a perfect opportunity. I had random thoughts knocking around between my two brain cells that needed typing. So I set out to find my parents and put one of them to work.

But I couldn’t find them in the house. They had vanished. What the hell could they be doing?

I started getting grossed out wondering, then I realized they’d gone to Walmart to do the Easter shopping. This was a great relief, as I wouldn’t have wanted to excavate my own eyes from my head after seeing something Unspeakable. Instead I was amused to think of my parents mingling with the People of Walmart and possibly ending up on the web later, depending on what they’d had the poor judgment to wear out of the house.

I guess I had a seed of paranoia taking root already, because it suddenly occurred to one of my brain cells that I’m a total dupe for visiting the People of Walmart—that it’s just a perversely clever marketing tool developed by Walmart to funnel even more shoppers in: shoppers insufficiently satisfied with Rollback pricing but wishing for spectacle.

For the suburb-bound, Walmart is the next best thing to a safari. (Or so my second brain cell retorted to the first.) Creatures as exotic as the People of Walmart simply couldn’t be faked or staged or set up—they have to be real.

But my first brain cell was suspicious. If Walmart isn’t behind the whole thing, couldn’t Walmart, with all its financial and legal might, shut it down? Or is it actually beneficial to have its brand identified with trailer-trash fashion and aggressively visible ass crack?

I don’t have a third brain cell, so the two had to work hard for a third option: Maybe the People of Walmart is a real phenomenon, the production of which has nothing to do with Walmart, but which Walmart tolerates because there’s no such thing as bad publicity.

Bingo.

I decided to get the lowdown.

People of Walmart was conceived by three guys in South Carolina who decided, just for themselves, to document the exotic apparitions we’ve all come to associate with Walmart—shoppers in low-hanging, crack-revealing sweatpants, bondage-wearing seniors, people with goats… When they invited friends to submit pictures, they had no idea how big the response would be. A deluge of photos crashed the website as it went viral.

Andrew, Luke, and Adam, who keep their last names confidential, are big fans of Walmart. They often visit the store wearing bad clothes, and they try to keep the site light-hearted (they don’t mock the disabled, for example; but if you’re riding a scooter without a shirt on you’re fair game).

Which means that not only is People of Walmart real—it’s a kind of homage.

And what does Walmart the corporate entity think about the site?

I thought about emailing them to ask. But I didn’t. I didn’t want to wreck things for Andrew, Luke, and Adam. Maybe, I thought (with both brain cells at once) Walmart Corporate has no idea about the People of Walmart. Maybe they would mess with it—OMG! I wouldn’t want to be responsible for that, so mum’s the word.

Speaking of which, how did my parents make out?

They came home bitching about the crappy deals on Easter candy, moaning that they’ll have to wait till the last minute for Walmart to start caving on the prices.

But they did get a swell pair of rainboots for Miss P.

And, on the way inside, my mum saw a woman stuffed so tightly into minuscule hot pants that three inches of orifice stuck out. (It’s true! Yes, Virginia, there are People of Walmart!) And, she added, that woman’s ass was “hairier than any of you bears.”

O’DOUL’S—What to do with crack

My Fellow Inebriates,

peopleofwalmart.com

My mum swears she saw ass crack in Walmart today as she was leaving with the stroller, the kids and the groceries. Right before that she’d witnessed giant, pendulous bosoms lolling out of a dirty negligee over in the frozen-foods aisle, a week before darkest winter.

I believe my mother because she’s too humorless to invent an elderly man in a death-metal leather jacket yanking up his ill-fitting jeans to return to proper privacy four inches of rectal spectacle. She said this parting shot from Walmart had kind of made her forget about the half-naked woman buying ice cream.

peopleofwalmart.com

I love fashion diversity, but even more, I love knowing that the People of Walmart are a real phenomenon, not something staged by Walmart haters or, more deviously, by Walmart itself. No, these people actually flock to Walmart every day wearing feathers and leather and tats and animal prints—without coaching or prompting—spilling out of their (perhaps carefully chosen) duds. What a marvelous, organic culture Walmart has spawned.

My mum predicted I would say it called for a toast and unfortunately kiboshed a bottle of wine, lording her opposable thumbs over me. Which leaves me to review a very unworthy beer available at grocery stores everywhere, even in Canada and probably at Walmart.

Calling O’DOUL’S a beer is charity to say the least. O’DOUL’S is an alcohol-free abomination, a <0.5% pretender. Faintly metallic and over-sweet, this wanna-be brew pours light amber-yellow, then rests uneventfully in the glass, wafting chemical aromas and mocking you with its lack of alcohol.

You guys know I find something to like about pretty much everything, provided it has alcohol, so it’s really not fair to beat up O’DOUL’S too much. If you’re pregnant or driving or drying out, maybe it’s a good solution. But it’s hard to tolerate something that taunts you with beer-like qualities but simply isn’t a proper beer. There are a million other fizzy beverages I’d have before I’d crack another O’DOUL’S.

So on the “crack” note, and for consistency’s sake, here’s my recommendation: Use it for enemas.