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Johnstown Walmart is Idiocracy
Friday, October 4 2024
location: rural Hurley Township, Ulster County, NY
[REDACTED]
Not too late into the morning, without Gretchen having even taken Charlotte for a walk, I loaded up the dogs and began my drive up to the Adirondack cabin. Again this weekend, Gretchen couldn't come because she had things she wanted to do, in this case to see a matinee of a play in Manhattan with her playwright friend KC, who gets free tickets to shows because she is a voter in the Tony Awards.
Since I usually have more food than I can eat on these weekend trips, I decided not to bother stopping at the Hannaford in Cairo. Instead, I brought a container still full of that kale, bean & potato soup I'd overspiced with ghost pepper and decided that would be my dinner. I also had some bagels to make sandwiches with and a couple road beers. I should mention that I strictly adhere to personal rules regarding road beers. For example, driving northbound, I can only drink a maximum of two beers, and I can't start the first one until I'm passing the castle east of East Durham and can't start the second until I've crossed the Mohawk.
After crossing the Mohawk, I did not crack open that second road beer. Instead I checked my good Nikon camera to see if I'd remembered to fetch its SD card from the card reader before leaving. I hadn't, which would make using it very difficult. So I decided to stop somewhere on the motor mile on Comrie Avenue in Johnstown to get a cheap SD card, a product whose demand, when I need one, is highly ineleastic. I once paid $70 for a 128 megabyte CF card when I needed one in Manhattan back in the Naughties. I thought there would be a drug store somewhere along Comrie, but Johnstown is a cut below your normal city; it has an Ollie's, a TJ Max, and even a Gamestop, but the main variety of retailers it has refer to money in their names: Dollar Tree and Price Chopper. There actually is a Walgreens, but somehow I missed it, and I ended up driving to the Walmart in the fuzzy area where Johnstown comingles with Gloversville. I parked at the edge of the its massive parking area so I could let the dogs out to run around a strip of woods. I found a trail through those woods leading to a pasture with some horses in it, and then I saw a guy up ahead of me on the side of the trail looking away. I didn't want to go anywhere near him or have Charlotte startle him (or freak out about the horses, which is another thing she does), so I backed away and returned the dogs to the car.
Inside the Gloversville-Johnstown Walmart really looks like the set from Idiocracy. It is full of profoundly unphotogenic people, most of them wearing sweat pants. I kind of wanted to get a picture of a dumpy young woman whose massive breasts were in danger of peaking out from beneath her sweatshirt, but until I have better camera concealment, all I can do is paint a picture in your mind.
The discount SD card I wanted only cost about $7 for 32 gigabytes (compare that to the CF card I'd bought in Manhattan 20 years before). While I was in the Walmart, I made a couple other impulse purchases: a big bag of Spicy Sweet Chili Doritos (the only vegan Doritos) and big bottle of cold-press coffee, which I immediately opened and drank like a road beer. (I enjoy drinking coffee while driving at least as much as I enjoy drinking a beer while driving, so it's surprisingly I don't do it more.)
At the cabin, I carried some more sand out from under the east decks, using it to fill a place down the driveway where I'd buried some electrical cable a little too shallowly in the Spring of 2023. But soon I resumed my drinking. I took a mixture of vodka and organge juice with me on a walk with Charlotte and Neville that took us first to the Woodworth Lake Bifurcation, then counterclockwise around the base of the hill the cabin is near the top of to the Lake Edward Trail. I lost Charlotte fairly early in the walk, and then I lost Neville near where I arrived at the Lake Edward Trail. They didn't return for awhile, causing me to grow increasingly paranoid that they were off misbehaving in a way that might disturb the other people in the home owners' association. So I drove the Bolt out to the public dock to see if somehow they'd reached there. They hadn't. And I didn't see them frolicking in the Ring-doorbell-cam-surveilled grounds of Ibrahim's A-Frame. Back at the cabin, I decided to backtrack a little on the Lake Edward Trail, figuring Neville must've found something interesting near where I'd last seen him. I reached the edge of where the landscape suddenly dips downward to the west and called out Neville's name. And then, off a couple hundred feet away, I heard some sort of dog noise. I followed it until I saw Charlotte staring at me. And Neville was lying nearby, happy but exhausted. They'd been trying to extract a chipmunk from his or her burrow and had made a couple holes in the soil. The but the dirt in the Adirondacks is harder to dig than it is in the Catskills, because it is shot through with a tight web of interwoven roots from several different species of trees and ferns. I petted the dogs on their heads and left them to continue their project. They returned to the cabin not long after that.
The other day on Reddit, I'd been reading about the low-budget time travel movie Primer, where someone had said it was similar to another movie called Coherence. So I'd downloaded it and intended to watch it this weekend. I made myself another drink and proceeded to watch it early this evening. Initially, I'd thought it would be about time travel. But it deals with a different science-fictiony idea: the multiverse, or (perhaps) something similar related to possible timelines. In Coherence, eight friends meet for a dinner party only to be gradually made aware that a comet has somehow made it so that multiple simultaneous timelines are happening and intermingling simultaneous, complete with doubles from another timeline storming into the one we happen to be focused on. Like Primer, it's all done on the cheap, without a crew or even a script, sort of like Blair Witch Project, and it works pretty well. The use of a comet as a trigger to the weirdness is a bit hokey for my tastes, and some of the scientific exposition qualifies as cringe, but there were parts of it that I found myself reflecting on later, after I'd eaten some cannabis.
That cannabis has spent the last couple years in the cabin basement, which was unusually humid over the summer due to my foolish idea of blowing warm summer air through it in an effort to warm it up. So that cannabis now tastes moldy when I eat it. But it's still quite effective. For example, as I lay in the bathtub this evening massaging the mysteriously-infected cuticle of my right ring finger, I the cannabis had me paranoid enough to fear that the symptoms all indicated cancer. After all, it had a mysteriously sharp pain that felt like an infection, but I'd been completely unable to get any pus out of it. Usually when I have an infected cuticle, all I have to do is tap it with a screwdriver and it bursts open, the pus floods out, and the pain vanishes. Then, though, I began to think the symptoms might better match my cuticle having been quilled by a porcupine. Tiny quills still occasionally emerge from Neville's face, having migrated over time from the inside of his mouth. Perhaps I'd brushed my finger into one of these quills and it burrowed in before I noticed. This would account for all the pain and lack of infection (since porcupine quills contain natural antibiotics, mostly for the benefit of the porcupines themselves, who occasionally self-quill by mistake).
A big bent hemlock at the bottom of the hill northwest of the cabin this afternoon.
Click to enlarge.
A standing dead tree at the bottom of the hill northwest of the cabin this afternoon. When I was a kid, my father referred to such trees as "dead men," and he never attempted to cut one down. I will occasionally cut such trees down, but one has to be extremely careful about large chunks vibrating loose and falling on you.
Click to enlarge.
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