How to die long before Christmas - Mark Morford
October 9th was a fine day indeed, strolling as I was through the crammed Walgreens near my yoga studio in the Castro on a balmy, Indian summer afternoon, picking up some deodorant and a cranberry Kombucha and a solar-powered garden gnome, some tennis balls and nine boxes of marshmallow peeps and maybe a dozen of those miniature, New Age sculpture-garden waterfall things with the spinning crystal ball and the LED lights and the gurgling sound, and also a massaging foot bath and a bucket of sidewalk chalk and some Astroglide and three pounds of beef jerky and an eight-foot tall, screaming animatronic zombie (for Halloween) because, well, this is just how you roll in Walgreens, the world’s most random and astonishing store in which to feel completely weird about humanity.
Halfway through my excursion (just the Kombucha and the deodorant, in truth), I noticed it. Just up there, near the wall of Halloween candy, next to the stuffed animals and the dried soup, right across from the Hello Kitty lamps and the cartons of adult diapers, a huge pile, a row, a stack of shiny boxes three feet high and ready to tumble down onto your innocent and unsuspecting worldview.
Candy canes.
It was 81 degrees outside. It was still early October, not even yet time to set clocks back an hour or pay way too much for a pumpkin in the city. Nearly three months stood like a lump of crushed hopes between that particular moment and Christmas – and yet, there they were, rows of holiday fare awaiting their rotation in the cycle of commercial life, because, well, why the hell not? Does anyone even notice or care anymore? Drug stores churn through this sort of prefab holiday crap like crack anyway, and candy canes have the shelf life of nuclear fuel rods. Might as well just leave them out all year long.
10,000 candy canes, ready to kill
The rest: http://blog.sfgate.com/morford/2013/11/05/how-to-die-long-before-christmas/
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