Costco: the underside of a big set of hairy balls

If you've never visited the sweaty, unwashed underside of a big set of hairy balls, and wish to, venture to Costco, America's consumptive wonderland, which is not only home of the one hundred and eighty count, twelve-pack pallet of anything you can think of (mayonnaise, toothbrushes, computer printers...), but the place where Americans go to shuck shreds of their ugliest habits, then leave them scattered about the Costco concrete right where it's hardest for you to maneuver your cart around them. Costco is a different sweaty underside of a big set of hairy balls than Walmart, though I fear they may be diesel-belching, basement hostage-hoarding, poop-in-a-bucket-in-a-van cousins who masturbate to the same beaming (well, sort of) magazine cutout of Sarah Palin. Walmart is where you go to see people dressed in old shower curtains (the transparent inside curtain that builds up mold, not the outside one that is sometimes less gross), where you go for new, fleshy metaphors for the Grand Canyon. Costco is where you go to get the stuff that makes the Grand Canyon wider, grimier.

I haven't been to Costco in a few years, probably since the last time I was driving past one and my mom was in the car with me, and she says "Let's go to Costco," and I say "Absolutely not," and she says "I'll buy you something," and I drive perpendicularly across three lanes of traffic to get to the Costco parking lot. The Costco parking lot. It's really something. And we were there at noon on a Wednesday. So thirty minutes later we've parked and walked up the mile-long shopping cart centipede only to be halted by a pod of housewives digging for their membership cards in their purses, as if being at the entrance to Costco is some sort of surprise. That is annoying. Get your card out before you're at the place where you need your card. I know this happens to these people every time they're here. It's the kind of thing you know about people. It's the kind of thing that makes serial killers kill serially. But Mom and I, we're prepared -- she flashes her card to the blank-eyed gatekeeper, for whom I feel very sorry, as he is African American, and he is in the very albino heart, in the thickest clot of the biggest artery of suburbia. Poor fellow just sort of glances at my mom's membership card, then hands us a coupon book, then wonders when he'll get to die.

I like buying things. I like having things. I like having a pillowy backup armory of toilet paper in the garage. I am an American consumer. And I like it. I do see the allure of Costco and its block of cheese that is six times (honestly) bigger than the block of cheese I am used to buying, but only because I've heard of the Duggar family. And, honestly, I think big families should have to suffer Costco and its bottom of the American barrel-ness. The problem is I think most people aren't bothered by the sludge at the bottom. They like it on toast with a genetically mutated over-easy egg on top. Bigger and uglier tastes fine to them. And I am comforted that at least, when the Zombie Apocalypse comes, and if Levi and I are able to get out of the house alive with our shotguns, there will probably be lots of good beer for us to drink; the Hummer family will be out scalping for Coors. 

So Mom and I are pushing our cart through the high ocean of pallets. We see a pie that is eighteen inches in diameter (honestly). I don't bother to look at the label because I know it is filled with something from a farm that injects its produce with the sweat and tanning oil that drips off of Hulk Hogan's elbows. Mom thinks I should forklift it into the cart so that Levi will be a happy man after dinner. I refuse, but mostly because I would find it embarrassing to ask a stranger to help me lift a pie. Thankfully the box full of 96 tampons was manageable on my own. 

There's a lot of amazement on my part as we peruse the aisles. You know what Costco is like. There are a lot of products you can't help but like, and they're all in bigger boxes, bags, or bottles. You take some, you leave some, you eat a few meatballs, and you smash a few heads with your quickly-filling cart in the process. 

And then there's the shore of checkout lanes. I found a pretty thin line at number twenty five, but was abruptly cut in front of by an Amazon shrew with a handful of baby clothes. I imagined they were for her fire-breathing infant, which will hopefully someday get backed over by a Range Rover in a Costco parking lot before it can learn its mother's ways. But it will probably live to post the pictures it took of its penis on Subway sandwich bread on its Instagram account. At the very least she was buying the clothes for a baby shower, which she will have to suffer through. In any case, she cut in front of me. I looked at my mom and gave her the pouty face I used to give her when we ran out of dessert. She shrugged, communicating to me that we would not be going spider monkey on this bitch, so I just threw our box of 36 Izze beverages sort of on top of her baby clothes and gave her some slivery eyes before a sickly thin, sickly tan, sickly strident cashier barked at me Gestapo style. I accidentally tried handing our coupons to her  and was gently reminded that she would please need my Costco card first (i.e. "COSTCO CARD!"). I gave her the Costco salute, then marched to the end of the checkout stand and shyly waited for Mom to pay. We cleared checkpoint one, rolled past Costco's weird and uncomfortably low-priced food distribution center (three hot dogs with chili on top and a set of four tires on the side for $1.99), then we cleared checkpoint two where an old man armed with nothing but two-day old whiskers wiped a highlighter down our receipt, and we were, save the Navy Seal exercise across the parking lot, home free. 

I did not like the experience. I am a wider, grimier Grand Canyon for it. And that's somehow okay. And that is absolutely the worst part.