ODE TO STAPLES...

     My body doesn't make any goddamned sense.

     Sometimes when I take a week off from work, after resting for a few days, I'll go for a long walk around my area to take a look around...sight-see if you will. It'll be a long walk, maybe twelve or so miles, and I'll come home with my legs hurting. I'll sleep extra long that night and be sore the following day.

     Yesterday, after eight hours of sleep I walked two miles to work. I then spent eight hours on my feet, cleaning, and walking around throughout the store on various tasks. I had intended that day, after work, to go to Staples to pick up some CD-Rs and jewel cases (I'm old...shut up) in an effort not to do all of my shopping on Amazon. It would be, at most, a doubling of my usual two mile walk home.


     However, to my surprise, that Staples store had shuttered since I was last there (curiously for the same purchase...I was old then too so shut up). Since I had already made up my mind to do this, I walked a few extra miles to another Staples location that I had remembered only to find that it too had been shuttered.
     Luck was not on my side nor was the weather as it had grown suddenly cold overnight and while my coats and shoes were up to the task, my pants were not.

     Undaunted, but starting to wonder if Staples had gone out of business and I had somehow overlooked that fact in my internetting, and stubbornly I continued to one last place I knew a Staples to be. Thankfully that location was still there and they were not in the midst of a Going Out of Business Sale so I was more a well-intentioned victim of downsizing I'd say as well as about six miles from home and now in the middle of a snow squall.
     Yeah, the weather was all kinds of cold and crazy that day.

     But I made my purchases which seemed a lot more expensive than they ought to have been (Amazon may yet win this war...) and set off for home. Boston Chicken would prove the beneficiary of my hunger as McDonald's, while it will offer all-day-breakfast, still does not sell hamburgers and McNuggets in the morning. I work overnights: morning is dinnertime for me! No respect for the graveyard shift...

     Unlike my vacation walks, I made this unexpected journey laden for half of it. Based on my walking speed and the amount of time I was out there, I estimate I walked about twelve miles not including the two I did to get to work and the unknown amount of distance I covered on the clock doing returns so maybe fifteen miles total for the day. I then ended up staying awake for thirty hours before finally crashing, sleeping for less than eight.

      And yet now, despite all that, not only did I not arrive home sore, I feel fine now and like I could do it all again today.

     I don't get it either...