The Devil Is Afraid To Drop A Duece In Wal-Mart

Not too long ago I had the distinct honor of going to Wal-Mart on a Friday evening to make an exchange. I decided to save four cents on a battery charger, so I bought one that was made by a seven year-old Chinese girl. Apparently, this particular girl forgot to connect the thing that made the digital display work for more than twelve minutes. I was going to make my exchange in hopes that the girl who made my new one was fresh on the job and not about to punch out after a twenty-seven hour shift.

Let it be known that I hate Wal-Mart.

If you ever see yourself start down a wayward path and you think your life might go downhill, go to a Wal-Mart on Friday night. Better still; go to Wal-Mart on the first Friday night of the month and just stand by the door for one hour. In an hour you will see what comes out of the woodwork and realize that if you keep going down the path you are currently on, you will be among these people. I guarantee you will straighten your ass up immediately. If not….don’t worry, Darwin will be with you soon.

Maybe I’m just bitter because I was only forty minutes into my hour and a half one way commute to work, or because I parked a mile away from the store to avoid the parking space hunters. Either way, I was not a happy camper and did I mention that I hate Wal-Mart?

Just when I thought things couldn’t be worse, they were. The first thing I saw as I neared the building was a shopping cart rammed into a door in order to open it. God forbid the two adults at the other end of the cart exert enough energy to push the door open with their hands. Who’s got time for that? Out walks a lovely young couple with a newborn baby in a carrier on top of the cart and various other items in tow. The young lady was about the size of a deep freezer, but that isn’t why this is burned into my brain.

The image that will stay with me forever is a very large, very pasty white woman wearing shorts and a tank top that would barely fit a fourth grader. At least I think it was shorts and a tank top because I could only see about ten percent of her clothes. Rogue flesh covered the rest of the fabric. She was loud and obnoxious. Every person in that parking lot knew she was there because she wouldn’t have it any other way. It’s been a long time since I’ve felt that much pity for one person and that’s saying a lot since I’m not usually the pitying type.

I didn’t feel any pity for Clowngirl, I felt sorry for the poor guy that was pushing her cart. I have to assume that he was the father of that damned soul in the baby carriage. I wasn’t about to ask. He came out of the mold that defines certain people: Camouflage T-Shirt, baggy pants hanging off of his ass, sideways baseball hat and chinstrap sideburns. I understand that it is really dangerous to stereotype people and in a lot of cases it is very offensive, but in this case Mother Theresa would have muttered “trailer trash” under her breath.

He pushed the cart slowly in her wake, keeping his head down and his mouth shut. I’m a pretty observant person and can read people pretty well so here I go:

This poor guy, I’ll call him Skeeter, was probably at a party one night and had consumed one too many PBR’s. He noticed the chick that was the life of the party and was immediately intimidated because he knew he had no shot. He continued telling his friends what he was going to do when he quit his job at Arby’s and started making some real money. A couple of hours later after being shot down by every other guy at the party with an IQ above table salt, Clowngirl came across Skeeter.

Clowngirl rubs all over Skeeter and lets him feel her up so he thinks he is the man for snagging the wildest girl at the party.

After he sobers up in a day or two he feels pretty good about himself. She starts calling him and treating him like royalty. He’s finally getting some real attention from a woman other than his mother, who still blames him for ruining her life, so he marries her when he finds out she is going to lay an egg. Once Clowngirl got that ring on her finger she turned into who she is now because she knows that as long as she rubs on Skeeter once in a while and lets him feel like he is in charge of something when his friends are around, she never has to work again.

Skeeter will stay with that woman he loves until he decides to die. Judging by the look on his face, it probably won’t be long now. At least, that’s how I see it. I’ll be watching COPS to see how I did.

The Handshake

I’ll keep this short and sweet because basically, no one knows who I am, nor should they care. I’m just writing this Bio because I have no idea how blogging works. I know that when I meet someone I like to introduce myself and learn something about the person I’m meeting since it usually sparks some pretty interesting conversation and more often than not I walk away with some new knowledge about a subject that I never knew I cared about. So here I go-

My name is Elliott Cox, I’m thirty-one years old and I was born on St. Patrick’s Day in nineteen seventy seven. I live in Winston-Salem, North Carolina with my wife, Jackie, my eleven year-old daughter, Amara and my son Elias who was born August twentieth, two-thousand eight, so he’s fresh out of the box. I’m planning to move south toward Charlotte within the next year because that’s where I’ve worked for the past two and a half years and I have a three hour round trip commute at least five days a week. The commute time doesn’t bother me much because I am an audiobook junkie. The part that’s killing me, like both of you reading this I’m sure, is the price of gas. When a gallon of the cheap stuff hit four bucks a gallon, I was officially in the hurt locker.

A few people have asked me why I would move from the beautiful quiet country home I have now down to the “citified” area of Charlotte. I’m doing it because I love my job. Don’t get me wrong, given a choice of working from home or having my current job, my ass would be on the couch in a half a heartbeat but as long as I have to be a part of the working public, I couldn’t ask for a better place to work.

My dream job is to be a full-time writer. I’m working toward that goal nearly every day but until that goal is realized, the bills have to get paid. I think that maybe having such a good job is putting a damper on my aspirations of being a professional writer. If I had a job that I absolutely loathed I would be trying ten times as hard to be able to quit and write full time. As it is now, I enjoy going to work and if my writing career doesn’t take off this week then so be it.

Okay, off the soapbox…

I grew up in the small, three traffic light town named Hemingway, South Carolina. I graduated from Hemingway High School (barely) in Nineteen Ninety Five and left for US Air Force basic training shortly after. I spent four years in the Air Force as an F-16 avionics technician (2A352A for all you Air Force nerds) stationed at Shaw Air Force Base in Sumter, South Carolina with the 78^th Fighter Squadron. I was one of the few that put in for world-wide duty in hopes of seeing new countries and meeting new people, but ended up getting stationed seventy-five miles from home. It could have been worse I d guess. While I was enlisted I got my wish of seeing new countries. The only problem was that the new country was Saudi Arabia and I had to live in a tent with other Air Force guys. Again, it could have been worse. I have nothing but respect for the men and women that were or are on the ground fighting, I had a cakewalk compared to them. The Air Force told me that I wanted to work on airplanes and I guess they got it right because that’s what I still do today.

After leaving the Air Force in Nineteen Ninety-Nine I took a contract job working on the Royal Netherlands Air Force’s F-16’s at Volkel Air Base in Uden, The Netherlands. While I was in Holland I lived in three cities; Nieuwegein, Eindhoven and Sintmichealsgestel. Holland is an absolutely beautiful country filled with the most polite and kind people I’ve ever had the pleasure of meeting. For anyone interested in visiting, my advice is to spend one day in Amsterdam to see the art galleries and museums then get the hell out! If you’re interested in just partying, then Amsterdam is the place for you except for the fact that you’ll be doing all of your partying with tourists like yourself. Go see the real Dutch cities where you will be a part of the Dutch culture, it’s a lot more fun in my opinion.

Anyway, I came back to the states in two-thousand and soon thereafter got back in touch with my then future wife. She moved in with me and the rest is history.

I guess that’s about the bulk of it. If you’re still reading, I hope I haven’t bored you to tears. If I have, sorry, but I’m a pretty boring guy and that’s the way I like it.