WALL-E

I went to see WALL-E in the theater, and I've had the dvd since it came out. I like the story. I don't quite agree with the breakdown of directive programming in an artificial intelligence in the view of developing a personality but it is a Pixar movie and those animate normally inanimate things.

I watched it again recently. Its message resonates with me because of the whole trash thing. But more than that, the Buy-N-Large ultramegastore in it reminded me of walmart.

I left walmart on the first of June. I worked there for exactly 4 years and 1 day. Over that time, I saw it decay from a caring place to a paragon of capitalism's dark side, greed. Avarice. Mammon. 

In that time, it moved further away from what Mr. Sam intended. It is so far away from that now, it could be on the moon. 

In that time, it opened clinics in some stores. The money center, literally the walmart bank. Nevermind that most supercenters have actual banks in them. In the store I worked in, they were less than 15 feet apart.

Walmart seeks to influence you to buy products with its advertising and 'clever' displaying of crappy items to draw you into what may be desirable and certainly more costly. You can't seem to go to walmart and not drop at least $50 in any one visit. 

In the store, it is more insistent, a drive to shove product down people's throats and take their money, driving consumerism and creating a dependence on it.

I still go to walmart. There isn't a lot of choice where I live to get some things. I mean, who else within 10 miles of the rural wasteland sells a computer mouse?

I don't really hate walmart. It is like Buy-N-Large in WALL-E, it does have what you need, but I hate a particular walmart. I hate that place and the people who work in it with a few exceptions. My Jen likely still works there. 

Why did I leave? I have Anxiety Disorder. It was getting worse and there was not a night after work earlier this year that I did not think of cutting my wrists. 

In the several months I have been away, I have gotten better. I still have moments but I can deal by sitting in this chair and doing my thing, writing and music. 

I may have to return to walmart, but I will refuse to go back to that den of greed, the parasite on Ft Hood, the Buy-N-Large of K-Town, Walmart 407.

WALL-E's human people, the fat invalids who floated on the lift chairs within that monstrous cruise ship, remind me of the customers there. Cattle. No brain or will of their own. 

I hope that the Mammon that walmart worships will lead to a serious karmic future when the American economy finally does collapse. The pursuit of money is a cancer in human society. 

I don't have the answers. I mean, I wish I never had been born. I want to go back to the 80s when I was a little boy, way before I ever heard of walmart, way before I developed Anxiety Disorder, way before money was important, way before my personal pains in my pelvic area. 

If a movie could conjure such a comparison to a feared corporate future when walmart is a major part of the government, WALL-E did it. 

I still depend on walmart for my med. I still depend on it for the Pepsi cube and things like hardware and computer/phone needs.

This dependence is a shade of things to come, I fear.

Garbage

If it is one thing I know, it's garbage. I have taken out like a billion bags of trash at home and at work. I have worked in 4 different stores, mind you.

It is stinky, nasty and eww, you dont want the garbage water to drip on your shoes.

My family, that is my parents and me, generate 3 bags of trash weekly. This is because of rampant consumptionism. What does that mean? It means that they drink too many sodas. I drink soda too but I limit mine to as few a day as possible. I don't want to be diabetic like my dad. Also, newspapers and magazines. They abhor the internet for some idiotic reason and thus, do not know that most interesting things can be found online.

Then there is the food. For some reason, the people who cook here always make too much. As I get older, I find I cannot eat as much as I used to. I hate that things come in bags within boxes, waste. I hate plastic shopping bags, those fabricy ones the stores have, they're all right, I suppose. I know that some checkers do not like them because they seem 'nasty'. I think that is the wrong kind of senstivity.

I, by no means, am hardly innocent. I take two showers a day. This is because I don't feel comfortable if I don't. I do sweat, oh gosh, especially when my anxiety disorder is provoked. Or it's just plain hot like it is.

I mainly eat things that come in a can, soup, spaghettio's, chili, but I also eat a granola bar every morning. More trash. Recycling is a joke where I am from. No one takes it seriously. This attitude of throwing it away prevails.

People want money to recycle, that is, being paid for giving trash to be recycled. This is idiotic. Money is the source for most problems we have in modern society. We will be slaves to it until human extinction. And even then, the earth will bear the scars of humanity until the sun bloats and melts it all away in billions of years.

I wonder, if we cannot make things that are made of something natural and recyclable. Foil? Aluminum, like all metals, is endlessly recyclable. But you don't want your bread to come in a foil package. Instead, it's plastic, which usually comes from petroleum. Plastic is not endlessly recyclable. Maybe could be once to five times before it breaks down. I know little about mylar to be truthful. It makes up those balloons that the floral department sells and often the shiny bags that some snack things come in.

I don't have an answer. I don't believe that anyone does.

Truth is, we were not meant to live this way. Primates have existed for at least 30 million years. Why did we have to be so different? I wouldn't mind being a spider monkey myself. Unfortunately, I am naked skinned anthropoid ape cursed with sentience. We all are.

It would be a good thing to know what happened to the Neanderthals. It could happen to us, and then there would be nothing human to replace us.

And if that happened, the Earth would breathe a great sigh of relief.