Wednesday, December 14, 2005

It's The Most Wonderful Parking Time of the Year

I had to go to the mall the other day. It’s never my favorite thing to do and it becomes particularly irksome during the holidays. It’s bad enough that the stores are crowded with angry, competitive materialistic nutjobs searching for the last X-box or Tickle-My-Anus Elmo. The absolute worse part – the thing that makes me thankful that I’m not packing heat – is the idiot who stops in the middle of the parking lot and waits for a shopper pushing his or her cart to reach his or her vehicle, unload his or her Tickle-My-Taint Elmo and drive away so the idiot can park two parking spots closer to the door.

I kid thee not. Some inbred, mouth-breathing oxygen waster tied up the entire row of heavy traffic so she could park two spaces closer to the door (and for those of you poised to leap to her defense, no, she didn’t have a handicapped parking sticker or license plate).

If by some strange alignment of the planets she is reading this (and that assumes she can read), I’d just like to say: Lady, I’m a fat guy and I take the first available space at the mall. Every time. Walking an extra twelve feet won’t kill you, and in fact, it may burn off one more calorie of that bag of Doritios you inhaled while watching Cops last night.

You’re the reason people hate the holidays. Get a credit card and learn to order online.

And while I’m good and irritated, let me just say I know why America’s children are overweight.

It’s because of my street.

The street I live on is exactly on half mile long. That’s 2,640 feet. I live near the top of the street

The school bus stops at the top of my street to pick up and drop off kids.

And every school day, there are mommies who drive their cars to the top of my quiet residential street to pick up their kids. Most of these caring parents live halfway down the street.

That’s about 1,320 feet.

Obviously too long for relatively healthy 9-12 year old children to walk.

What happens to these kids when Mommy takes them to the mall? Does she sling them across her back like a fire fighter rescue? Does she commandeer one of those motorized shopping carts the old fat women use in Wal-Mart?

As I’ve said before, I’m no Lance Armstrong, but I do walk a few miles several times a week. And as a kid we walked to school. If we’d asked Mom to pick us up because we couldn’t walk 1,320 feet, we’d have been laughed out of the house.

Okay. That’s it. I’m going to quit before I tell you had we had to walk through the snow with no shoes and we loved it.

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