Slumming It
Negotiating the rusty shopping cart through the isles of the Pen Argyl Weis, Iām trying my best to navigate between the skids of boxes in the center of the floor and the employees stocking shelves. What would be the job of an overnight crew anywhere else in the country is done at peak business hours in this sleepy little town trapped in the past fearing sundown. I swerve back and forth to not mow down a lanky teenage boy with a pubic-esque Harpo Marx wig placed in the center of his forehead.
How this became the international male quaff they settled on is anyoneās guess.
Everyone in the building hates me and refuses to make eye contact. My outsider status is obviously apparent with my clean shit and lack of body odor and hot wet ass smell. They know Iām not from these parts and donāt cotton to big city carpet baggers frequently patronizing their establishment with my EBT card. This is MAGA country, where the working class break their spines and spirit performing hard labor to finance the Zionists plight for Isreal. A clueless conglomerate of confused antisemitic Caucasians championing the wrong side because a New York billionaire figured out a way to optimize their hatred.
This is the grocery store Iām forced to use due to it being the only one in a five-town radius. Their callus price gauging should be applauded on its sheer ruthlessness alone. It feels as if the place were a franchised and buying expired products that feel off the truck instead of the real deal. That would explain them never having anything youāre looking for, including Weis brand fare. In this store the motto is āYouāll get what we have, and shut up about it.ā Nothing within these walls has any flavor and youāll have to take a second mortgage out on your home to buy a pound of hamburger meat. They charge even more for the filthy yardbird shrink-wrapped in salmonella.
The whitecaps are restless today. Alabaster afros on every four-and-a-half-foot octogenarian dingbat standing in the middle of the lanes gazing into oblivion, causing me to ponder who left the front door open. Where are their handlers, their obese Hattian nurses helping them spend their money? Not in the Slate Belt, we have freedom here. Freedom to irritate every living creature with our obnoxious willful ignorance.
When I get to the register, I max out my per diem in shame as the staff flash their judgmental stares. I walk to my car and attempt to not get runover in a sea of vulgarly enlarged pick-up trucks commandeered by men in stained neon orange t-shirts. As Iām loading my trunk, I overhear two hundred pounds of mayonnaise poured into cat hair covered leggings demean her child with profanity.
I think back to a bumper sticker I saw on the back of a car as a child that read, āYouāve Got a Friend in Pennsylvania.ā













