== Your Shiny Happy Discount Death = By Mark Morford

Amongst the bulk cheese and the plasma TVs, a slew of coffins, now at Costco. Bargain!

http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/gate/archive/2007/04/11/notes041107.DTL&nl=fix

If you feel your life is just too boring, if you feel you are lacking sufficient gobs of wicked surreality and ironic humor and morbid perspective combined with a strange sense that this planet is actually some sort of warped dreamlike petri-dish experiment run by scaly hyperintelligent lizards possessing savage and incomprehensible senses of humor, well, I have a suggestion.

Simply march your happy overfed American butt over to Costco. Not just any Costco, mind you, but Costco out in, say, the Palm Desert region of California, where the land is scrappyhot and the air is dry and the massive strip malls and neon-green golf courses outnumber healthy environmental concern by a factor of about 1,000 to 1.

Do this: Walk the massive air-conditioned aisles and ogle the giant slabs of meat and the enormous bins of imported Guatemalan fruit and the economy packs of adult diapers and the two-gallon bottles of vodka, much of it generally aimed at the happy retirement crowd that lives here six months out of the year.

And then notice, as you leave, your cart crammed with drums of olive oil and 10-foot plasma TVs and 80-packs of frozen cream puffs, that strange display you apparently didn't notice when you came in, the one right by the front door next to the tires and the lawn furniture and the hot-dog stand, the one you seem to have blocked out because it was just too weird and your mind couldn't really get around it. ...

Read the rest:
http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/gate/archive/2007/04/11/notes041107.DTL&nl=fix