Dream Collage

Last night, I began in Wal­mart. I had a few bot­tle of soda and a cou­ple other small items, all of which I could hold in my hands. I approached a check­out counter, and placed my items on the belt.

They was a woman in front of me, and a cou­ple in front of her. They were a mess, dirty clothes, short atten­tion span, and act­ing rather hyper. The could not stop mov­ing. I heard the man say, “I hope we have enough for all this,” as he went through his pock­ets. She grabbed the Jerry’s Kids dona­tion cup and dumped out all the coins. “Now we do,” she replied.

The checker came over to them. “You know, you are really not sup­posed to do that– take the money from the dona­tion jar,” he said. “But that’s OK, I can see you need it,” he con­tin­ued. “Here, let me help.” With that, he started help­ing the cou­ple get more money from the dona­tion jar. Then he went to other cashiers to get their dona­tion jars.

I looked at the woman behind me, and she shrugged. The woman in front of me was incensed. She started com­plain­ing, and quite loudly. Turns out she was not so upset about steal­ing the dona­tion money (though she was), but about the delay in check­ing us out because the cashier was busy help­ing the cus­tomer take the money.

I decided to just leave. I left my gro­ceries on the check­out counter, and just walked out. The woman said, Are you just going to leave?” I said, “No, I am going to go complain.”

As I went past the door greeter (who, oh-so-politely told me to have a good day), I asked where the man­age­ment offices were. He pointed me to an ele­va­tor. He told me to go under the bridge and past the pictures.

As I came out of the ele­va­tor, I was in a large, white room. There was a walk­way across the cen­ter, on the level I was on. I could tell this was the bridge the greeter spoke of, so I crossed it and went down a level.

The room was sort of like a mini-mall. There were shops lin­ing the sides of all types, and shop­pers milling about. There was a Mrs. Fields, a sport­ing goods store, and, of course, a kiddy pho­tog­ra­pher. And that would be the pic­tures I needed to pass by.

I was taken straight in to see the store man­ager, and he  was quite apolo­getic. He wanted to go right up and see the cashier in ques­tion, but I did not want to. I told him I was done, and I just wanted to leave. And I did.

The man­ager, I real­ized upon leav­ing, was my next door neigh­bor Peter.

Inter­mis­sion

Vignettes

We were tour­ing a prison. Our tour guide was show­ing us var­i­ous areas, and asked if we wanted to see the “Ant Hill.” It was a big, open place, with cels around the edges. Inmates were all out, play­ing in the yard. We looked around, and noticed that this was a place where a lot of the food was pre­pared for the jail. I real­ized that all the food must be what drew the ants to the area.

I leaned back on the counter, and felt some­thing mushy. I had sat on the dough some­one was knead­ing. I turned around to apol­o­gize, and the female inmate told me not to worry, it was OK.

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I was mov­ing on a hard packed dirt field toward a road I wanted to travel on. There was a cart com­ing from the oppo­site direc­tion with the same intent. I needed to beat it, and I raced toward the road.

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I was walk­ing up the road, and met a group walk­ing the other way. They were gen­er­ally nice, but one woman was antag­o­nis­tic. We started talk­ing about France, and she brought up that they were all Catholics. She did not like Catholics, I could tell instantly. I tried to cor­rect her, and told her that there was a good deal of Huguenots there, too, espe­cially in the area we were dis­cussing. The Haute-Normandie area was known for the Huguenots that lived there, and Rouen was almost their cap­i­tal. That seemed to soothe her.

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I was going to go shop­ping at Sports Author­ity. I was argu­ing with some­one that it should still be called Garts. The per­son told me they changed the name when the chain was bought out by the Chi­nese. It made sense to me– the Chi­nese pro­duced every­thing in the store– all the balls, mitts, nets and tread­mills. Why shouldn’t they own the means of dis­tri­b­u­tion? It made sense to me, and I decided to go else­where to shop.

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I woke up.