My mother LOVES Walmart. There, I've said. Make the inferences that you are, I know you are.

She will buy tons of crap there with the reasoning "It's so cheap!" Makes a lot of sense Mom.

We would get dragged to Walmart (or wallbarf as we called it because the particular store we went to would always smell like rotten socks, although they've cleaned them up since then) at least once a week. I think I spent more time in Walmart than I ever set foot inside any church!

I don't really pretend to understand this love affair. The stock doesn't change all that often, so how could she spend so much time in there? God forbid when the new seasonal stuff started rolling in - which now if I think about it, is pretty much every week. She'd spend hours and hours examining stuff in the store. I would go run to the toy section where me and my brother would always try to get into trouble. We figured if we got into trouble we'd have to leave. Such is the logic of a kid.

My mom's favorite holiday is thanksgiving. I don't know terrors she experienced as a child or whether her mom locked her in her room so she never experienced Halloween, but she goes gonzo boinko over Halloween. The house outside and inside is embarassingly decorated.

And it's not like cool stuff. Like she never made a boiling vat of goop over a fire, or big vats of spaghetti that would look like brains. No it was always smiling pumpkins and little witches with happy looks. Tons and tons of pumpkins, which always made our house a target for the other kids in the neighborhood stealing them and smashing them into the driveway (and guess who got to clean it up?)

We didn't carve pumpkins. That was too messy. I suspect really that she didn't like what we'd carve. Throwing up pumkins, pumpkins kills other pumpkins, that sort of thing.

And you'd think that our mother with her endless crafts would make us the best halloween costumes on the block right? No way, we wanted to be serial killers or pirates or bloody zombies, and she wanted us to be little lambs and puppy dogs or superman. So we ended up after yelling and arguing to grab some store shelf piece of crap costume.

So one year the new Halloween stuff comes out and we know we're in for a long "visit" to Wallbarf. Good thing about Halloween though was that she'd buy so much frigging candy - enough to feed five neighborhoods and the canadian army - that we'd always steal it and she was none the wiser. We'd take it to school and sell it too. Entpreneurial - see gotta keep thinking ahead.

She goes batso over this Halloween stuff because for some reason Walmart this year decided to go with a kinder, gentler Halloween. Lots of little animals in costumes and happy scarecrows and boring stuff like that. She is in there forever it seems. We run to the back and play with the toy guns and yell and generally behave like asses. We're hoping someone will get us in trouble. Then we can go tell our dad, who will totally sympathize with us and be on our side.

But I dunno Walmart must have been cutting staff back because no old people came to tell us to simmer down or yell at us in accents so we couldn't understand them. It's boring to be wild and not have anyone stop you. Really man.

So we decide we're going to go out back and check out the dumpsters. We did. We were back there for a while.

My mom LEAVES us there! She's so irritated with us that she frigging leaves us in Wallbarf! Man the stench alone was enough to make us behave the next 10 trips. We ended up walking home, probably a 6 or 7 mile walk. We half expect her to be standing in the door, arms crossed, eyes glowering at us. But she's not! She's in the kitchen happily playing with her dolls and putting away the candy.

So me and Rex grab a couple of bags of candy (Herhsey chocolate bars for me, Aeros for him) and go upstairs to eat back all the calories we'd burned after walking home from being abandoned at Walmart....