Costco Warrior

My life fades.
The vision dims.
All that remains are memories.
I remember a time of chaos.
Ruined dreams.
This wasted land.
But most of all, I remember the Costco Warrior.
The man we called “Dan”.

To understand who he was, you have to go back to another time.
When the world reached for the white paper.
And the suburbs sprouted great wholesale warehouses filled with rotisserie roast chickens and palettes of 1000 sheet Charmin UltraSoft.
Gone now, flushed away.
For reasons long forgotten, the mighty warrior tribes’ leaders wigged out and waged war on their own peoples and touched off a blaze which engulfed them all.
Without bath tissue, they were nothing.
They’d built a house of straw. The toilets clogged and overflowed.
Their leaders strained and strained and strained.
But nothing could stem the flooded cesspool tsunami.
Their world crumbled. The cities exploded.
A whirlwind of senior only lines, home-made facemasks, and “one sheet per” visits.
A firestorm of fear. Men began to feed on men (takeout only).

On the roads it was a bare cardboard tube nightmare.
Only those mobile enough to scavenge, brave enough to break curfew could hope to keep fresh.
The gangs took over the highways, ready to wage war for a damaged roll of janitorial 2-ply.
And in this maelstrom of hemorrhoids and piles, ordinary men were battered and smashed.
Men like Dan. The warrior Dan. With the ba-woosh of a power flush, he lost everything.
And became a shell of a man, a burnt out, desolate man, a man haunted by the demons of his past, a man who wandered out into the wasteland.
And it was here, in this blighted place, that he learned to “enjoy the go” again …”