Making sure my do gets done — it's takin' some doin'.

Greetings from Lewisville, Texas, right outside of Dallas. I'm sitting in a Holiday Inn Express, killing time before going to bed. In the morning, I got a pretty major Damage Control client meeting.

I flew outta Raleigh early this afternoon, and Homeland Security snagged my hair gel and toothpaste at the airport. The tubes were too damn big, they said, which meant Paul Mitchell and Close-Up both hit the RDU trash can.

So, when I got to Texas, my agenda not only included check-in and dinner with the client, but a run to some-damn-place for some kinda stuff to make sure I could glue my pompadour into some kinda shape come morning. And, of course, some sort of dentifrice to beat the crud off my teeth with.

Lucky for me, there was a wonderful girl in charge of the shuttle bus/van thing here at the Lewisville Holiday Inn Express, and just a few minutes shy of their 10pm cutoff, she ran me down to the local Super Walmart for handful of those travel-size toiletry things. Hair crap. Tooth stuff. And what the Hell, a chocolate PayDay. (We passed the time by talking about Whataburger, and I'm now sitting here in my room wishing to God I had one.)

All this pointed out a pretty important thing about life in the Present Day. And it's this: you go to a Super Walmart in Lewisville, Texas, or the one down the street from my house in Garner, North Carolina, and they're exactly the damn same. The travel-size hair crap is in the exact same place in both stores. The stores smell the same. The odd color created by the flourescent lights is the same. The people stocking the shelves or manning the registers and the freaky-looking customers all look the same. Even the selection of hot rod magazines is the same. And as we all know, this is a trend that's creeping across our once-great nation all too damn fast.

So, while I give Raleigh a lotta grief about its evolution into Nowheresville, USA, I guess I gotta cut it a little slack. It's not alone in its vanilla-ness. Look at Lewisville. Hell, look at Anywhere. And ask yourself: can we turn this Big Mess around? Or is this what we're stuck with? What we're gonna hand off to our kids one of these days? "Gee, thanks a million, Pops."