Lord of the Flat Screens

I was at Wal-Mart when the doors opened on Black Friday. There were hundreds of people lined up outside, a full host of bargain hunters yearning to get their hands on a $100 20" flat screen TV.

I wasn't standing in line, I was only casing the situation out for my sister and sister-in-law. The shoppers were dressed for deer hunting, covered hear to toe in toasty carharts, carrying thermoses of coffee )though mine would've had whiskey.

They looked like American refugees straight out of War of the Worlds. That tired, soulless look in their eyes. Their faces numbed blue by the cold. They tempers were shortening. They had been waiting too long, and longed for the taste of battle.

The crowd wound tighter and tighter as it came closer to five. It was like the clock hands were pulling some sort of string tied to all their hearts and it was about to snap. When cars tried to poke through the lines, they people laughed at them. They pounded on the glass doors. Shouted at the clerks inside.

I ran back to the car and dove into the warmth, chattering, "This is a dark, wicked place. We must flee." My sisters gave me the look. The same look your mom gives you for playing "Lord of the Rings" in a K-Mart, when you're still in your mid-twenties. The "please don't talk like Aragorn all day look."

I paid them no mind.

When the doors opened, my sisters slammed into the crowd, blindly following the pack to whatever treat they smelled in the back of the store. I had to find a different road.

There was one way that would take me there quickly, a route wholly avoided on Black Friday: women's lingerie. This was a dark path that had frightened me since I was a small boy.

When I was still a tot, I was hiding from my family inside a round clothes rack. I waited for someone to yell at me, pay me some attention. When they didn't I poked my head out and found I was alone. I searched blindly for them. After a few wrong turns and I found myself surrounded by women's undergarments.

Vast towers of pink and lace and silk, closing me in, pulling every masculine breath from my tiny lungs. Thousand of pink terrors staring down at me, an army of brasierres sleeping and waiting to stike if I made the slightest sound. Those were--those were--boobies up there!

Vile!

Although my opinion of women's undergarments has changed significantly over the years, I still find the underwear aisle a little frightening. Still, I struck outward, like Frodo going through the mines of Moria. What foul, scantily clad orcs would meet me here, I didn't know. But I had a quest, and a prize to attain.

And there they were. Hundreds of televisions stacked taller then my head along the aisles leading to electronics. A Wal--Mart worker ran off to help someone and abandoned her cart.

In moments I spirited the television away and was first in the checkout line. In and out, just under five minutes. I should have won a prize.