The Great Shopping Cart Massacre

I used to spend a fair amount of my time stalking shopping carts and photographing them. (I intended to say 100 percent of my time, but that sounded weird so I edited it.)

Winner of "Best in Show" at the International Shopping Cart Exposition, 2011. (Domesticated.)

Why did the carts fascinate me? For one, they are sly. They are quick. They can be quite savage, and can attack without warning. Yet they are also lovely, wild creatures, often filled with candy wrappers and empty bottles of Night Train Express.

The afterlife for me looks like...a shopping cart?

And they migrate! Once a single shopping cart infiltrates a neighborhood, you can be sure that more will follow, as if drawn by the scent of their kind. And as for their reproductive capacity—well, shopping carts will try to mate with almost anything, such as the door of your brand-new car. Basically, they are used to snuggling together in close proximity and, like a sausage and a bagel, fit together like magic. Traditional shopping carts are the randiest of the food and goods transportation mechanisms, unlike the "Four Wheel Deluxe Rolling Thingy," below, which hasn't even bumped wheels with another cart-like entity for at least a year. Sad.

But my scientific interests took a turn a while back, and I took a break to pursue some other topics. My recent scholarly publications include:

Chlorinated Pools: How Come There Is No Plant Life? (The Journal of Well-Funded Yet Incredibly Pointless Studies, 2013)

Wallpaper Moves So Slowly Because It Doesn't Want to be Caught So it Can Kill You in Your Sleep (Reader's Digest Large-Print Editions, 2014)

Goodbye, Doo Doo. Where You Goin' Now? Can I Come, Too? (To be published by The Golden Box for Young Readers, 2016) *Reviewers may request ARCs by writing to me in the comments section of this blog.

Anyway! All of these ventures were deeply boring for one reason or another. Except for the children's book, which was not boring at all but still gives me the shakes and the willies. Have you ever been inside a sewer? All in the name of authentic research, but it's not very nice.

And then today I came across this horror—a multitude of shopping carts, dead in a ditch! Had they flung themselves to their doom because people had been buying too many heavy objects, like pumpkins (out of season) and Big Fat Loaves of Bread and Bacon Bricks? (Note: I purchased a Bacon Brick at De Ciccos on Halstead Avenue last week but no carts were harmed during the event. Bacon Bricks should be the subject of another post. What, you've never bought a bacon brick?!)

The humanity!

What led to this massacre? Please, shield your children's eyes, because these photos are disturbing.

Gravely injured; no hope for recovery. 

I can't even bear to look. Heartbreaking.

Going to kill self now.

Ahhh...glglggjjfjfjjk. Choking on tears.

What led to this horrible event? Was it because I ABANDONED the shopping carts for "more interesting" pursuits?

But no, we must not blame ourselves. In fact, I think this is clearly the work of the notorious Pimples Tuscadero, disgruntled "Stop 'n' Shop" bagger, age 22. Vengeance shall be mine. Oh yes, it shall.

You have not died in vain, my beauties. I will chronicle your majesty once again. Just as soon as I finish my work on Basement Crickets of the 21st Century.

You might also like:

http://thepartypony.blogspot.com/2008/08/nature-red-in-tooth-and-handlebar.html

And a whole lotta my older posts, too. Get to it. Life is short, and awfully sweet.