Two weekends  ago I went to a Wal-Mart in Delmar, NY to purchase a gym bag. Being there, I felt compelled to purchase a few other things like toothpaste and deoderant. While walking through the tightly packed retail mega market, I passed a display for condoms.

I think people make a big deal about Wal-Mart on both sides of the issues. Some consider it a den of satanism and others a bedrock of American pride. Personally, I haven’t thought much about it. To the first group of people, I say this: Where on earth can you get a laundry bag, a bicycle, a twelver of Natty Ice a $5.99 copy of Deuce Bigalow: European Gigalo,  a Jeff Gordon shirt and a lawn chair at 2:26 a.m. EST?…I know you can’t find another place. There is no other place for that. To the second group of people, just get a life, it’s a fucking store not a Basillica. You can get sporting goods and jimmy hats there and one of those big plastic crates to bury your wife in.

But because of that latter group, I was taken aback by the condoms being out in the open. Not because I care was I shocked. Despite my Catholicism, I’m not opposed to birth control. Condoms are the easiest form. I was just weirded out by it because I figured Wal-Mart, making itself out to be a family place wouldn’t put a recepticle of perhaps the most shocking bodily fluid right there on the floor. But when you think about it, why wouldn’t they? Even Wal-Mart customers like to get down.

 So, I bought a box. Nothing big. People buy condoms everyday. I am not with anyone right now and the last time I had sex was a disaster never to be repeated again (future congressional campaign down the drain), but I figured I’d buy some just so that I could a: buy condoms on a Saturday afternoon surrounded by as many as 200 other shoppers and b: just have them around. I purchased the ones up there. Those are the only condoms I’ve ever bought in my life. Not sure why, either. And that brings me to the point (I know, it took a while to get there).

What the hell makes someone choose a rubber anyway?