I’m sitting here drinking coffee from my hot pink coffee mug, and I notice it has a big silver logo on it: Aladdin. Why Aladdin? This is someone’s company name, I suppose, but it strikes me that my coffee cup is meant to take me away on a magic carpet. Yet here I am, at my desk, hammering emails out to editors, clients, employees and fellow agents. Just past nine and I have probably sent 50 emails. Just past nine and I find myself wishing, yet again, that I could duplicate myself. Some days I work along, my brain frantically arriving at agenting thoughts and ideas—and writing thoughts and ideas--and I literally crave self-duplication! I want to be more than me so I can do all the things in this lifetime that are out there!
Aladdin, take me away! Aladdin, duplicate my brain and body!
No, I’m not losing it, but neither do I feel that I have to self-edit so much on this blog. An editor asked me recently, “Why do you need two blogs?” I could hear amusement in her voice—slight, but it was there. I had to explain that each blog had its own purpose. The agency blog can’t have my meanderings about coffee mugs or blackberrys or my kids. This one’s for me, a place where I can let it allllll hang out, baby.
And that brings me to Walmart. How, you may ask? Well for about two months I’ve been
wanting to pose my Walmart theories here, and haven’t even had time to put it on paper. So here we go. Walmart, I have decided, is the southerner’s hive mind. This fact was confirmed for me yesterday during the tornado warnings when report after report on the television included some person with a BIGTIME Southern accent relaying their tornado sighting in relation to the Great Corporate Obelisk: Walmart. As in, “We was driving over to Walmart to pick up Jimmy, and I looked up, and there it was! A big funnel, just there (thair) in the sky!” Or, “We were there in Walmart, just shopping, and suddenly this man comes over the loudspeaker saying, ‘Code black! Code black! All shoppers and the employees head to the middle of the store!’ And we were in there, and the roof was just ashaking!”Walmart and its relation to small town America is a novel unto itself. I think especially here in the South, where the appearance of Super Walmart in my town of 3500 people was like the arrival of the first automobile. Everyone converged on the place, and you couldn’t move one aisle without bumping into someone you knew. But it puts me into a brain fog. Too much brightness, too many choices, too narrow aisles. I stumble through there in a fugue state. I should be excited, now that I can purchase and acquire goods without restriction, but I think it just freaks my brain out.
Or, maybe my brain isn’t hardwired for hive-minding. Too bad—I could accomplish a heck of a lot more every day if I could truly brainshare.
Good day.
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