It's Good To Get Out Of The House

Some days you get up with the urge to do something. Some days you don't.  And a lot of days, your brain just messes with you and you can't decide if you want to do something or not.  Today, my brain was messing with me.

I was up before 6 am, and before long, I was wandering around the house looking for something to do, but not sure what I was mentally set to do.  These are my ADHD days,  and all tasks must take no more than a half-hour to accomplish ... an hour tops.  Recently, I've been annoyed by the looks of both of my blogs, so I decided to screw around with them.  You can see the results on this one, and I went bat-shit crazy with the other one, changing not only the look, but the title.  You can see the result here ...

I decided I wasn't real pleased with the new looks, but my attention span had waned and I decided to do something else, because I was bored.  Actually, I was bored and unhappy with myself, which is a bad combination.   When this combo hits, the only way I can escape it is to go someplace and buy something I don't need.  Sometimes I can do this by myself, but today I wanted company, so I persuaded Jan to go with me, even though she was perfectly content watching television and playing her little hand-held Tetris game.

The best place to go when you want to buy crap you don't need and want to feel better about yourself is Walmart. Or at least it is for me.  You can buy all the crap you don't need cheaply, and you can usually spot someone to make you feel better about yourself.  Invariably, I'll see someone and say to myself "Geez, my self-worth is lower than a burning sack of shit, but at least I don't look like that!"  Of course, there's a good possibility that someone else is looking at you and thinking the exact same thing. But I choose to ignore that.

Today, I got a "threefer".  An old man wearing a denim hat, white t-shirt under bib overall cutoffs with tan dress shoes and white socks; a middle age guy sporting a long mustache with the ends wrapped in some sort of sparkly string and tinklebells; and a woman on a motorized cart who was so big that only one third of her ass occupied the seat, and the other two-thirds were equally distributed hanging over each side.

One of my beliefs is that no matter where you go in this country, the people in Walmart look exactly the same. And this belief was unshakeable until last month when Jan and I visited a Walmart in Gallup, New Mexico.

We had been on the road for several days, and after we had checked in to our motel and I had turned the AC down to its lowest possible setting, Jan told me that if I was going to keep the room freezing, that she needed a sweat shirt to wear to bed.  Gallup is a small town, but we saw a Walmart just down the street from the motel, so we went there to get her some bed wear.  The parking lot was absolutely packed, and when we went inside, we just stood there for a few seconds, dumbfounded.

Everyone was Navajo.

I swear to God, there were no more than 10 caucasians in the whole store, and we were two of them.  We walked up and down the aisles and it was so hard to keep from gawking, but it was just fantastic!  I think we were in the store for about an hour, and a half hour of that was waiting in the check-out line, but I didn't care.  Some of the people, especially the women, had on traditional garb.  The whole thing was just fascinating and we talked about it the whole evening after we returned to our motel room.  It turns out that Gallup sits right in the middle of the Navajo Nation, which spans both sides of the New Mexico/Arizona border.  It was one of the coolest experiences we had on the entire trip.

I never would have thought that it would have happened in a Walmart.