Pantsed!

OK let me get this straight: Here's how the tree in my front yard looked three days ago. It’s true that its leaves are gone NOW but can anyone tell me why, on the fifth day of November, Santa Claus was already suited up and scratching his nose at the mall?Here he is as I caught him on my cell phone. I could have gotten a better picture if I'd crept closer and taken more time to take his picture but I was pretty sure if I did, the pointy-eared elves controlling the old Change Purse would have wrestled me to the ground and pulled 50 bucks out of my jeans, just for the privilege of capturing his image even without a baby in his arms. It's like with God back in the time of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob - clear down to Moses: you couldn’t take His picture either or wear shoes around him or say his name out loud even.  ("Hey SANTA!!" I could have yelled defying that rule too but I was afraid he might see me.Her saw me anyway and raised his hand in a wan wave.I waved wanly back and there we were, two weary grownups, just doin’ the Nine-to-Five just trying to get through the day.So if  Santa’s a victim too then who’s responsible for the near-violent way the holidays get shoved under our noses so early? I thought about this as I wandered into one of the department stores  where a cosmetics person hawking perfume tried spraying me, all sneakily skunk-like. A hundred yards in I came upon a Sales Associate pantsing a mannequin behind a carousel of Activewear.I really tried to get that picture but she caught me watching. It was some sight is all I can say. And here’s me thinking all these years that nothing's harder than working tights on to the fat flailing limbs of a squirming toddler. Trust me as one who watched unnoticed for a good 30 seconds: pulling skin-tight leggings on a giant vinyl doll is a whole lot harder.And come to think of it the doll was being dressed by the sales associate and so technically wasn't getting pantsed at all. I guess the pantsing is reserved for the rest of us suckers  - and the reaching in our pockets too.

Super-Soaked (again)

Every SINGLE time I turn into the Target parking lot I’m amazed by the gangs of people swarming storeward. They move as if on a conveyer belt with just that kind of Night-of-the-Living-Dead absence of personal will, as if chanting to themselves Target Store ahead, must enter, Target store ahead, must enter. And hey maybe that’s why the name and logo. Target stores are the dusky inner hallways of flowers and we poor suckers are the bees; they’re the nipple made purposely dark for the hungry milk-seeking newborn, the ♀ to our amorous ♂. "We got what you need honey, come on in!"So yesterday I did and in my tiresome schoolmarmish way immediately donned the Scornful Cloak, saying to my young companion "Look at this! People not from the west come into our stores and are stunned by the abundance and variety on the shelves!”We passed a brightly colored stack of  bubble-blowing kits. "They say our pupils dilate in the presence of so much stock!" "True that," said my young friend, studying the back of the Dr. Dre CD resting right beside a DVD of Sleepless in Seattle, that long-ago cry-on-my-padded shoulders film. They’ve got it all nowadays, from drugs to electronics to earrings so dangly they look like chandeliers. These days you can even buy a couple of noggins of iceberg lettuce or a brace of green peppers held up as taut and double-mounded under their plastic wrap as breasts in a bra ad - along WITH your peat moss and storage bins. But “Who needs all this?" I rattled on. "No wonder they hate us in other cultures!  Look at the tumbled stuff in these mini-aisles up front here.” I said, suddenly slowing, my eye on this nice little sword with its curved and piratey knuckle guard.Hmmm!” I said. “I wonder if they have another like this?” We made a quick dash up and down those halls of honey and sure enough, here was a second one tossed in the bin with the Super Soakers®. So, two swords, the exact right length and made of nice bendy foam. I threw ‘em quick in my cart and was through checkout before you could say Undead.