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.