Bleak Humor Books

FROM "Soft Core" . . . I have a strange relationship with Wal-Mart. I despise the place yet I find myself undeniably drawn to her. (And make no mistake, Wal-Mart is a female - a siren of sorts) Standing outside her doors at two o'clock in the morning after swearing I would never come back, I feel like some sort of stalker ex-boyfriend. It reminds me in a weird way of the 2000 presidential elections when Bush was stealing the recount in Florida. Katherine Harris was all over the news pretending to be impartial and always standing in profile, her back arched carefully. She was awful and frightening and tacky and improperly medicated and embodied everything that was wrong with the world just then but there was no doubt in my mind that I wanted to sleep with her. A part of me was strangely desperate to suckle at her ample silicone teat. In many ways this is how I feel about Wal-Mart. I told that story to a female therapist once and asked her what it meant. She said she thought I would be better off with a male therapist and that I made her very uncomfortable with my use of the word "teat". My problems with Wal-Mart have continued. The inspiration for this foray into the mouth of the beast was, as usual, late night television. I was eating a box of cinnamon Pop Tarts, smoking cigarettes, reading a book and maybe, just maybe, perusing the net for some Latin American midget amputee porn. The TV was on just to keep the voices in my head quiet. The soothing light and rhythmic cadences that flicker from the box calm my inner static. For some reason I noticed an infomercial for a Bowflex that I had seen a million times before. The female model was ripped - simply fantastic in that perky, personal trainer kind of way. It occurred to me in that moment, as I was brushing Pop Tart and ash off my lap, that in my current state of fitness I would never again sleep with a woman that good looking, or even aspire to sleep with a woman that good looking. I simply had to start working out again, if only to keep some sense of realism in my masturbatory fantasies. It seemed to me that all of these workout shows and commercials had suddenly started focusing on the "core". This was a term that had cropped up in the last couple of years and had immediately become ubiquitous. They used these BIG RUBBER BALLS to stabilize "the core". The used a trampoline to focus on "the core". It seemed as if they sort of meant the abs but were including the back, the intestines and possibly even feces as well. Regardless of its meaning, if any human being ever needed work on his "core" it was me. My core was soft and weak. It lacked definition both in actuality and in theory. I was off to Wal-Mart at 2 a.m. to buy a big rubber ball. I should have turned around when the greeter looked at me with pinpoint pupils, said "NO WAY", horse laughed, pulled me in for a smoky hug, and laid a kiss on my cheek that squished with old lady tongue. Things tended to be a bit different at this Wal-Mart. . . .