Hell Bent For Leather, FFF #18

**Author's Note** This weeks starter sentence was contributed by the much esteemed and right honorable David Barber. My entry for this week was inspired by a comment that David left on my tale of Homer and his young ward, Glaucus, from last week. He suggested that the whole thing could very well have been played out by the cast of Monty Python's Flying Circus. I own the entire set of Monty Python and take every oppurtunity to warp my children with it. So here is to my tribute to Monty Python, Charles Bronson, Mr. M. Crum, and Mr. Barber. May your world be tiled from floor to ceiling!

As the sixth shot of whisky burnt its way down, I suddenly remembered what I left the house for. My first thought was that I was looking for the missing "E" from my whisky but that would be ridiculous, and this isn't Sesame Street. No, I was engaged in that most loathsome of chores: shopping. The only way I can bring myself to do this is to get a little tight first.

To be honest, I was a little tight after the fourth shot. The other two were just so I could stand the insufferably perky girl at the check out counter. The teeny bopper with too much makeup, ten pounds of plastic neon jewelry, and who punctuates every sentence with an "OMG". Yeah, you know the one.

I went to Walmart, that many-headed hydra of commerce that keeps popping up on the landscape like an open, weeping boil on a vagrant's buttocks. It truly is one stop shopping, and one stop was as much as my rattled nerves could handle. I grabbed a cart so I had something to steady my wobbly, drunken gait and tried very hard not to look anyone in the eye.

I sped from aisle to aisle, grabbing what I would need, all the while dodging fat, toothless mothers and their simpering, snot-nosed ugly kids. The only real delay was at the sporting goods counter where the pock-faced little twit told me that there was a ten day waiting period on purchasing a handgun. "Screw it, give me the Mossberg 500 model with the bullpup stock and two boxes of shells. One with deer slugs and one in buck shot. And be quick about it, I've got shit I've gotta do!" He moved with unaccustomed speed to get rid of me.
I tried to tune out whatever the teeny bopper at the checkout prattled on about while Sir Elton John warbled out something about a "candle in the wind" on the P.A. "Why," I thought to myself, "does every fecking store have to play Elton John in the background? Do they think it will make you lose your senses and buy more crap?" I thought about the help that Walmart had hired and subjected to eight hours a day of Sir Elton and it seemed like maybe I was on to something.

As I loaded the stuff into the back of the Jeep, I went through my mental checklist: shotgun with shells-check, orange marmalade-check, rat traps-check, beef jerky-check, three gallons of lighter fluid-check, road flares-check, three cases of cheap beer-check, one gallon of Spanish olives-check, rat poison-check, Charles Bronson's magnum opus the "Death Wish" movies, the entire series-check, vitamins and pep pills-check, smoke bombs-check, guitar strings-check, deep sea fish hooks-check, scent blocking camo coveralls size Large-check, twelve pack of disposable Bic lighters-check, small canister of liquid hydrogen and sewing needles-check and check. Everything I needed was here.

Say what you want about Walmart, but the wretched little bastards do carry everything, and when you are going to spend the weekend drunk and hunting a rat the size of a Saint Bernard that has holed up in the wainscoting, you need one stop shopping!





Doc