Predictive writing Thursday, April 15, 2004 It's..sunny. There's...light. Lots of it. My eyes can hardly adjust...after weeks of rain I don't know if I'm still evolutionarily equipped to handle it. :) Anyway, I went to Wal-Mart yesterday. This wouldn't be something to blog about save that for, years ago, while I was sick with a very vile flu, I concieved of a book that I've written tons of pages on, called Darker Days than These. It was a futuristic about a woman who was a reluctant assasin for a government permitted security agency who, refusing an assignmnet, gets assigned to guarding cola trucks. (See, people are so poor, that they'll mob even garbage trucks if they think they can get away with it.) And the point of this was, that Wal Mart is the only store left, in Monaco's time, and she goes there in one scene, and remembers what it was like, acording to her aunt, to have a varity of things to buy, and it sounds to her like a myth, a fairy tale, something that can't be real. I ought to hurry up and finish it, I think, becasue, well, it's starting to come true, and if I don't do it soon enough I won't have "predicted" the future, I'll have recorded truth. For instance. I could have sworn that there were more varieties of garbage bags than "Best Choice" and "Hefty". Didn't Glad use to sell garbage bags? Yet, when you go down the ailse at Wal Mart, half of it's taken up with two brands. Now, I do suppose that there are people who feel that I should be lucky that I can buy garbage bags at all, that I have a choice between two. They would be correct. But that's not quite my point. Slowly, as Wal Mart takes over, they'll choose for us what products we can have and what products that we can't. And it bothers me. A visit to Wal Mart is smoke and mirrors, all bright colors and confusing layouts and humongous quantities of things all placed to trick you into beliving you have a variety, you have a choice. There are things that I like -- Pledge Floor cleaner, for instance, (and not the stuff with orange -- the new trend -- in it.) that I can't find. It's still being made, but for how long if the bigger chains no longer distribute it? It causes a fake supply and demand. I've lost a lot of good products to this, and I can see, as Wal Mart kills the business so that it can price fix to its heart's content, that the list of things I'll feel nostalgic for is going to get much longer. Yeah, I can live without these things. I can use Murphy's Oil Soap instead. But I want to be the one to choose, not Uncle Sam. And since my choices, locally, are either Gaint Eagle, Save a Lot or Wal Mart, I'll be contributing -- ironically -- to the erroding away of my consumer rights. Permalink Cindy scribed this at 2:59 PM 0 comments

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