THE HOLIDAYS are terrible and exhausting, this is known. I truly believe no sane, rational person enjoys the holidays — whatever your creed or culture, whenever the holidays occur for you during the year, they translate to an exhausting gauntlet of forced socializing, travel-related misery, and maddening commercialized cheer.
To wit: Every year The Duchess and I make the pilgrimage back to her homeland to visit with her family. There is no similar pilgrimage on my side of things, because I have very sensibly faded myself from my extended family. At this point I doubt my cousins could identify me in a police lineup, and I am pretty certain that is precisely how it’s supposed to be.
When we fly to Texas we usually stay in a cool little hotel where they have a fridge in the room stocked with beer, liquor, and snacks. This is a glammed-up minibar, of course, but I like it — sometimes after a long day of eating barbecue and avoiding the topic of politics all you want to do is snag a tiny bottle of Jack Daniels and a bottle of Lone Star and sit on the bed watching Shark Tank reruns, so this fridge has an outsize impact on my life.
But this year, when we stumbled into our room on Christmas Day (and let me tell you, anyone who thinks flying on December 25th should be easy because who in their right mind flies on Christmas Day has no idea how many insane people, like us, there are in the world — the airports are absolute madness) the hallowed fridge was empty. We just assumed the hotel had stopped their minibar policy and thought nothing of it, but as a result I was dispatched the next morning to a CVS in order to procure a few necessities for The Duchess and to grab a few drinks and snacks to have in the room.
A Football Field of Late Stage Capitalism
I fired up my trusty Big Brother Tracking Device and Google knew what I was looking for without me having to type anything in. The Maps app was already up and pointing me towards a CVS just 1 mile away. I briefly thought about walking there, because in New Jersey me walking 2 miles to do some light shopping is an everyday occurrence, but in cities in Texas if you want to walk places you have to be willing to cross some very busy highways and also commit some light trespassing on a regular basis, so I thought better of it.
When I arrived at my destination, I could see the CVS sign, but could not locate the actual CVS. This is because the CVS was not really a CVS but was instead a CVS counter inside a Target. That’s right: In Texas the stores are so large they subsume other stores, like a metastatic fungus. I settled myself and strode inside, and realized I was in the Largest Target I Have Ever or Will Ever Experience. It appeared to be the size of several football fields. The aisles were so wide you had to shout to be heard, the ceilings so high you could see birds or perhaps bats circling the sun-like lights.
This was the day after Christmas, too, so the place was a war zone. The shelves were empty — and I am not exaggerating. They were empty. Trash and debris littered the floors, employees sat on the floor hugging themselves and weeping. Targets are known to be total shitshows — I have never been in one that was not largely devoid of actual merchandise, or that did not appear to rely on the customers themselves to restock the shelves. But this was a whole new level of emptiness.
Slowly, I began to assemble the items on my modest list. I had to travel quite some distance. Many items were on random shelves in strange areas of the store, and it was only sheer luck that brought me near them. When I asked an employee about the presence of contact lens solution, she burst into a cackling laugh and then recited Marlon Brando’s speech from Apocalypse Now.
In the end, I got almost everything on the list, although I had to make a few creative substitutions. I returned to our room, and the rest of the trip was typical: 40% driving in the car on enormous, nearly-new highways, 30% family time, and 30% the aforementioned drinking while watching Shark Tank and reevaluating my life. We got on a place three days later and returned home, where our cats sniffed us doubtfully and then went back to sleep.
Then the hotel emailed us our final bill, which revealed that upon encountering an empty mini-bar fridge that was empty because they had never stocked it, they jumped to the rational conclusion that The Duchess and I had consumed $1,200 worth of beer, whiskey, and snacks and billed us accordingly. Everything is, indeed, bigger in Texas.
Happy New Year, y’all.