There is a place in Springfield, where Glenstone meets the James River Expressway. In that place, there is a vast shopping center made up of dozens of businesses. One of those businesses happens to be the endless expanses of DIY know how known as Home Depot. If you have never been to a Home Depot, you are probably not familiar with their endless aisles of tools and construction material. There are similar stores in other parts of the world. Lowe’s, Menard’s, even Ace Hardware, but Home Depot is by far and away the largest. You see, Home Depot is not just a hardware store, home depot is a fold in the space-time continuum. It is believed by some that all Home Depots are the same Home Depot, connected on the inside by trans dimensional warp fields. I can’t say one way or the other, but I do know that once lost in a Home Depot, you must learn to survive any way you can…

And Our Descendants Shall Transverse the Great Black Wastes to the Eye of Hope

It was in the South Glenstone Home Depot, perhaps one hub of the one true Home Depot, that my Roommate and I found ourselves wandering. We had made the journey to the south side of town with one purpose in mind. We were to gather the necessities for creating a foam armory of our very own.  This was in the days of yore, when swords were forged not from fiberglass and the mythical blue foam, but instead were honed in the ancient ways from PVC and the vastly inferior “pipe foam.” The needs of the boffer-smith required a specific alloy of the pipe foam, and it could only be mined from the endless aisles of the Home Depot.

We had managed to find, and have cut to length, the shafts of PVC we required. We had gathered the proper amounts of duct tape, an almost endless supply. We had yet to find a vein of pipe foam suitable for our needs, however. We searched on. We crossed the tile lands, past the border into small appliances. We dodged past the large appliance salesmen and nonchalantly walked through the wall of doors. We traveled as deep into the Home Depot as the Forest of Pre-Cut Trees, and as far abroad as the birth of fences. No where in our search did we find the fabled foam.

Soon, we were lost in the endless lands of the Home Depot. We knew that we had walked for days and would never possibly be able to find the mythical material before the lights of the close sky went out.

We began to  plot.

If the sky went dark over our heads, we would fashion our weapons not from pipe, foam, and duct tape, but from only the primitive pipe and tapes. We would stalk the flannel-clad and vested natives of the Home Depot as our prey. We would gather other lost travelers to our cause and we would lead them to land above the sky to build a new civilization and tame these wild, savage lands. We had the vast resources of this fertile kingdom to support our rule and believed we would be once again find our way to the Tower of Endless Knowledge, where books on all subject pertaining to the rebuilding of humanity could be found.

Life would be hard at first, as we lived from the spoils we could hunt in the under-lands, but eventually we would be self sustaining. We would grow our own crops. We would build our own homes. There was talk of if you built homes from the books on building homes or if you learned to build homes from the books. We decided on the former, otherwise there were too many of the same book. We cemented our plans and began to seek shelter for the sky dark. It was then that we stumbled from the end of the Illuminated Halls and came face to face with the men of currency and our freedom.

We left the Home Depot, drove to the far end of the parking lot, and got a late lunch at IHOP. As we looked back across the asphalt, we could almost see the ghosts of our potential civilization waving their plastic spears from the roof of the Home Depot across from us. We could hear their ghostly pronouncements as the village elders explained the prophecy that one day their children’s children’s children would find the Legendary EXIT and cross the Great Black Wastes to the Eye of Hope, and once there, would enjoy upon themselves the feasts of Cobb’s Salad.

That was the last time we journeyed to the lost lands of Home Depot, but to this day, we hope that the other lost travelers of the land of DIY found their way to the Land above the Sky and built their cities. We hope that one day, one day, their citizens will be able to migrate to the IHOP and get for themselves a Cobb Salad… and a bottomless cup of coffee.