I am just back from an expedition to Price Club, a warehouse store with huge aisles lined with open boxes of everything from cigarettes to fancy collections of power tools in a plastic case, wines and tires and jeans and frozen burritos, flowers and camping gear -- you name it. The aisles are crammed with wide-eyed people of all kinds and levels of life, psuhing carts overflowing with all kinds of food, drink, tools, gimmicks, apopliances, clothes and books.

And I should add that even though the consumer spirit was enervating and the crowds were tiresome and the lines slow, there was an undercurrent of -- I dunno -- a sort of celebration of all the good survival and well-being that those wagons of food and stuff represented. And it made for good spirits throughout the place even while people were fretting over which color shirt or which brand of wine to buy.

In any case it was certainly a peaceful -- meaning cooperative and pleasant-- activity, and a celebration of plenty, and I found I could enjoy it for those reasons in spite of the other drawbacks.

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