The other day I decided to go to Walmart to see if the commercials were true and everything is cheaper. I like to support local businesses but sometimes I wake up with my hair in sideways beehive, a giant pillow crease on my face, and my tits falling out of the sides of the ahh-bra and I just want to go incognito to Box Land and push a cart through the aisles while I sing to myself and just generally blend in.

I went to the one up in Scarborough and used the back roads to get there. It’s a sunny Saturday morning and I am anxious to get a bunch of crap that I am listing off in my head:  Pop tarts, sardines, canned Coke, etc.

On my way,driving through the streets of suburbia which I love by the way, I admire the little post war bungalows.  Back in the day when I was a real estate agent, I would troll those houses that were for sale and imagine myself living in one, blissfully alone.  You know how people in this town think all that fugly gumwood trim is so “classy?” Well I hate it! I would paint it all out in Benjamin Moore cloud white and the walls Tiffany blue and decorate with 1960s Danish teak furniture from Atomic Age.  My little bungalow would be so sweet and I would be so very happy and complete.

I still have the same fantasy, except with a practical touch!  I would find one with a self-contained basement apartment that I would rent to some young man from a foreign country like Serbia who had a temporary work visa.  In our Bungalow of Utopia, he would fix things around the house.  On hot summer days, I would make him lemonade and we would sit on the back deck that he built with that new kind of environmentally-friendly pressure treated wood from Rona.  He would take off his sweaty shirt and he would be all muscly and tanned, and we would sit in awkward silence, fraught with sexual tension.  He would speak very little English but I would patiently teach him and by the end of the summer, we would have entire conversations.  He would even get my jokes.

Later in the fall, while shopping at Home Depot, on a whim we would decide to buy a hot tub in time for winter! I’m not really community hot tub person, although I *do* take the jets in my gym whirlpool seriously. The ones that people have in their backyard are lame but it is kind of fun to be outside in hot tub in the middle of the winter and rolling in the snow and getting back in all numb and tingly. Milos (that’s his name, by the way) tells me  about the hot tub he had in his childhood growing up in Montenegro and I have to give in, as his face looks like a pleading puppy.  So cute I can hardly stand it.

I always have the longest build ups to any given sex daydream which is what a car ride to the suburbs is all about.  But just as I am about to pull into the Walmart parking lot and finish off this fantasy that get super-hot in the hot tub and then ultimately ends in Milos being deported back to Serbia, I see this woman walking on the street, barefoot.

As I get closer, I can see she is bat shit crazy.  Her hair is sticking out in the back, her pants are rolled up, and she is talking to herself.  Actually, there’s not a whole lot of difference between her and me except I am wearing flip flops and I am in a car.  Seriously, not only was I talking out loud to fictional Milos, I’m actually blogging about it.  That is certifiable.

I blame my neighbours!  It’s because of them and their do-gooding ways that have rubbed off on me that I can’t ignore this woman. They are always helping people in need, especially me, that I have to pay it forward. I am going to miss them when I move into my Box Land bungalow.

So I stop the car and open the passenger window and call out to Crazy, “Do you need any help?”

She is speaking in tongues or in some other language.  She completely ignores me!  But she is wearing no shoes and I feel bad for her so I take off my flip flops and run out of the car and wave them at her.

She stops,looks at me blankly and takes the flip flops and puts them on her feet.

“They are too fucking big!  I can’t walk in these!”  She kicks them off and stomps away, resuming her monologue of gibberish.

Aaaal-righty, then.  I tried.

And at Walmart, a tin of sardines is 97 cents and at Loblaws $1.39.  Pop tarts are also a whole dollar cheaper per box. And I score an awesome deal on Colgate toothpaste and Great Lash mascara so I am ahead of the game.   So really, it was worth the drive to Box Land.  On the way back, Milos and I argue over the radio station.  I do not like hip hop! But I let him have his way because compromise is the cornerstone of every successful relationship.

And speaking of box, from my In-Box,I got another e-mail asking for advice…I love this!  Keep them coming:

I went through my husband’s browsing history and found all these filthy porn sites!  I am freaked out, I feel like he is cheating on me.  I confronted him and he got all defensive and he said he would stop but I think he is lying because he erases his history.  This is not how I was brought up, I don’t know what to do.

I don’t think anyone was “brought up” on internet porn, it’s something you find for yourself, a private exploration.  Men are visual sex pigs and if it wasn’t for internet porn, they would be out on the streets, trolling the malls, going up and down the escalators with mirrors in their hands.  Don’t feel he is cheating on you and most of all, don’t feel you have to compete with these interweb hos.  Typically men do not marry their porn so you don’t really have a chance anyway.  He is googling up the opposite of you. Instead, check out some of it yourself. You can google all the fetish-type stuff you want and you wouldn’t have to waste so much time reading 50 Shades of Grey garbage.  Women read that shit in public! That slays me. As a woman, I enjoy internet porn because sometimes I am too exhausted creating these elaborate Terrence Malick-feature length sex fantasies in my head and I can just get to the juicy bits and maybe learn a trick or two. And if it really bothers you so much, dump him. And send him to my house.  I’ll let him live in the basement.