So I have been clipping coupons and shopping more slowly as to check out the deals in an effort to save money. I thought I had done pretty well with the coupons and getting only the essentials at Wal-Mart with the baby with me, which can either be really pleasant or really horrible. Honey has consistantly taken a dump on the way to Wal-Mart the past three times, so I did a whiff test and determined she had in fact made it 4 for 4. Apparently this time, it helped her calm down and chill out in the stroller as I arrange and rearrange coupons and look for price per ounce and such, versus how she sometimes gets as if she has been pumped full of steroids and thinks that the straps of the stroller are a challenge that must be overcome with the highest legal amounts of saliva and brute gnawing with two sharp little teeth that are more like a can opener than baby teeth.

The longest part of shopping at Wal-Mart is never the actual shopping. It is always the checkout. They have security cameras aimed all over the store, and they are attached to super computers that can run blindingly fast algorithms determining when the highest volume of shoppers are heading towards or waiting in the line for checkouts, and then they send home their fastest, brightest checkers. The ones that speak perfect English, the ones that know that cleaning their register can help prevent sickness, the ones that are aware that customers are actually attempting to leave the store before their fruit rots on the conveyor belt. And they leave the others.

They leave the ones at the registers that are in the midst of a divorce, or a yeast infection, or a foreclosure on their home, which involves a tow truck and extra brake lights. You can see it in their hardened face, itching to have you ask for a price check, bitch, so they can snarl at you and roll their yellow eyes while they reach their claw to the phone and snap out a request for Earlina to come to the front for a price check. They leave the ones that have more rings on their fingers than teeth in their mouths. They leave the ones that you want to spray disinnfecting cleaner on before they handle your bag of diapers, lest your child be destined to soak in some of their DNA and also have a family tree that doesn't branch.

I got the kid who had the hand-me-down, plays-with-himself square glasses, who fills one bag full to the top with every heavy thing on the belt, then puts one toothbrush in another bag and considers it done. I was more disturbed that he seemed completely unaware that there were five people behind me waiting and going grey and getting wrinkles in the years it took for him to scan each item and place it into a bag. It was the deliberation, as if he were memorizing everything I was purchasing. I was very happy I didn't buy any underwear, because I have a feeling if I did, I would come home one day to see him sitting on my stairs wearing them and those glasses and nothing else as he stroked a receipt as if it were the woman he always fantasized about touching. I broke him out of his reverie by moving a couple things to a different bag and removing them myself from the rotating wheel of white Wal-Mart wonders.

But then there were the coupons. Oh, Lord, the coupons. He stared at the first one as if he didn't know that the symbols on it were real or if he had just popped a zit on his back just by thinking of it in his concentration to understand the glossy paper he was fondling, I mean holding. I jogged his memory by reminding him that I had in fact purchased that same item, and told him the quantity and the scents of said items. He nodded and mumbled something about, "I know."

Really? You know? You know what, exactly? That Stephen Hawking could have checked me out faster? That my childbearing years were zooming past me as I stood there watching your brain move at the speed of dirt? That the number of Dungeons and Dragons characters you have created does not equal actual friends? That a weekly shower would be a step up for you? What exactly do you know?

I finally was released from the transaction twenty dollars' worth of coupons and blank stares and some drool later. I took my receipt from Mr. Deficient Wal-Mart cashier and he actually had the balls, whether his own or a virtual imitation created on a lonely Saturday evening with Barbra Streisand playing in the background, to wish me a good day.

Gee, thanks. I will take that with me as I haul my now two-year-old daughter to my cobwebbed covered vehicle which has been ticketed for the tags being expired, go fill up the tank for $35.87 a gallon, and head back to my home that is now run entirely on soybeans growing on the roof. Good day? That's like wishing a lesser herpes outbreak on someone--you know they dread that they have it, like the need for shopping at Wal-Mart, but they deal with the burning pain and unsightly break-out as gracefully as they can, aware that they have a lifetime of such experiences ahead of them, much as I need to save thirty cents on toilet paper now so that my kids can one day afford community college. At least one class anyway. But just the class--no lab, too many fees. I cannot handle the depths of despair that I must endure for my kids to have lab fees also. I might have to, gulp, cut more coupons and spend more time at Wal-Mart. Oh the humanity!