Dime store of doom!

For years I've trained myself to expect the unexpected, inherently fallacious nature of that concept be damned! But no matter how hard I work at it, there are some things you're just never ready for.

A few hours ago I wandered into one of those faceless bargain discount stores that from the outside sort of look like Willy Wonka is subletting the place for storag. What I encountered beyond those doors was a challenge to my sanity, indeed, to the very notion of sanity.

I found myself in a space that simply should not be, at least, not according to the agreed-upon rules of the natural world as we understand them. It was like an Escher painting, it seemed to just go on and on forever. I mean this place was deep, the aisles go back so far that I suspect if I hadn't turned around I'd presently be brunching in Narnia.

There's so much merchandise that each aisle is only two thirds of a customer wide. The further in you go, the more and more narrow the aisle gets, and yet somehow you never seem to have any less space to move in. Try to understand, it's unquestionably and verifiably narrower at one end than the other, there's no tool or sense you possess that would tell you otherwise.

But somehow the logical ramifications of that conclusion, ie that you should have less space to stand and walk in, never manifest themselves. You are equally as cramped at the wide end as the narrow. I can only conclude that the aisle does not crowd you any more than it already does in spite of the reduced dimensions simply because that is not possible.

There's no place at which you can cross from one aisle to the others, so if you want to browse another area of the store or if you reach a dead-end (I'm trusting to blind faith that there are finite boundaries in this building and that the aisles don't just stretch on forever into the mysterious aether) then the only thing to do is to turn around and go all the way back to the front.

So once you've chosen your path, you are pretty well and fully committed to it. God help you if you're trying to retrace your steps while other poor doomed souls are trying to push ahead, because in all likelihood you'll all be jammed up Zax-style, each of you an immovable obstacle in the other's path.

The deeper you are in this place, the more the shelves lean in at the top. At the five yard mark the angles are so extreme that I don't think they can be measured by our puny human mathematics. The merchandise occupying the upper levels of these perilous slopes clings to each surface through some eldritch means of which I won't even speculate, the result being that a parade of plastic fans, TV trays, and bobble head dolls leer down at you like gruesome gargoyles the whole time.

And I haven't even yet mentioned the stuff they sell here. The farther back you go, the tackier it is. This is what the inside of John Waters' mind must look like, a jumbled array of the most ludicrously tragic consumer goods ever spawned, stillborn, from factories in the Far East staffed by vacant-eyed zombies who must think that this country is some sort of Valhalla of bad taste if this is the crap we're importing.

The things I saw, oh, the things I saw. Anamatronic dancing Santas, portable lava lamps, inflatable plastic Jesus on an inflatable plastic cross, digital LED calendars bearing the image of a psychedelic Virgin Mary, snow globes with western motifs, Rubbermaid tableware, Tiffany lamps with religious iconography, shadowlanterns covered in dolphins, knockoffs of knockoffs of factory rejects of brand-name toys, glow-in-the-dark dartboards, Santeria dashboard icons, irregularly sized clothes hermetically sealed in plastic, food with labels in languages I don't even recognize, music boxes where tiny dogs dance with tiny mice (how does that even make sense?!).

It's a mad carnival of consumer society's outcasts and rejects, products of fevered minds that could fall only into unsuspecting hands. Not to mention all of the blinding flashing light-up shit. Let me ask, is it possible to catch epilepsy, is that something that can happen?

I tried to take some pictures of the place but most of them didn't turn out as anything but a barely-recognizable blur of shapes and colors, like what the world probably looks like to a four month old. I did get one mostly clear shot, although it's taken from near the front so the full brunt of the horrors aren't visible. Even so, I wouldn't recommend staring directly at it without some sort of protective eyewear. You've been warned:

This has certainly been a sobering lesson on the wisdom of respecting our own inherent limitations. Though the furthest and most desolate lands have been mapped, the deepest crevices of the ocean plumbed, and even the dark void of space holds increasingly few secrets, there are still some places where, definitively, Man Must Not Tread.

For all that though, I'm tempted to go back and explore further, but I half-expect that if I do I'll find that storefront vacant and shuttered with the neighbors insisting "There ain't been nothin' there for years now!" It's like the evil carnival in that Ray Bradbury book, it blows into town with the autumn wind and then vanishes utterly in the midst of a foggy night, taking with it those foolhardy souls who never did reach the front door again.