I got a flu shot on Tuesday at Kinney's in Hinesburg. I hadn't been in a drug store in a while and it got me to thinking. 

Why are drugstores so effing big? Why can't they be like the size of a gas station? With a waiting area, a counter, and "out back". Why are they selling eight varieties (I didn't count but there were a lot, including multiple children's models with flashy trademarked names) of snow shovels across the street from a hardware store? I know the answer: because they have the space! But why do they have the space?

Why is everyone in there overweight, underweight, or old? I saw a guy walking in wearing the smallest fashion-forward, tastefully (but not really) torn jeans I've seen on a man. And they fit! I didn't know you could buy men's jeans like that; maybe they were his girlfriend's. Or maybe despite the fact that he looked like a 30-year-old meth-head, (like I really know what a meth-head looks like) he is in fact a 5' 10", 110 pound 14-year-old.

And why must they be so goddamned depressing? Is it the fluorescent lights, the lack of visible windows, the uninterrupted silence (outside of the musical intercom that inexplicably makes it worse), or is it all of those things?

It's all of those things and more. Somehow they've taken the worst aspects of a hospital and a grocery store and combined them. Granted, it's been a long time since I was in a Walmart. But at least those places have some life to them. Maybe it's more like a doctors office; no one seems to want to be there.

I could hear a song on the intercom, one that I would otherwise enjoy, and in that boredom factory it was powerless against its sterile surroundings. If there are zombies living among us, that's where they go.