Emotions. I can’t live with ‘em or without ‘em. And to complicate matters, I’ve recently learned  that all of us are two beings, not just one. We’re the spiritual person who wants to be an angel and a crawling, growling animal who wants to “Do it like they do on the Discovery Channel.” Just like a rocket ship trying to break free of earth’s gravity, we try to lift our spirits out of the animal world and up to new spiritual heights.

The mere mention of spiritual heights leads me to the subject of Wal-Mart. I can’t believe Wal-Mart loses $3 billion to theft every year. Supposedly, they do lose $3B. Here’s something that is totally true: I was a key figure in a Wal-Mart theft a few years ago. You’re hearing about it now for the first time. It’s an exclusive story – and I don’t mean “exclusive” like the local TV news means it. (Because they don’t mean it.) Here is a strange-but-true and totally exclusive Wal-Mart who-dunnit.

My story begins, naturally, in a Wal-Mart… near the racetrack where my Dad’s horse won a few races in 1985 … wow, did I just wander off the subject. This particular Wal-Mart is in a “Mills” mall that is the biggest tourist attraction in the state of PA – and it’s only a 25 minute ride from the Liberty Bell! (Yes, more people like the Mall than the Bell.) Stay with me now. This is the same Wal-Mart store that sold me a fairly nice, $80, blue-pinstriped suit. I’ve worn the suit twice, with no problems.

Anyway, a few years ago, I found a shirt that I liked on a sales rack and threw it in the basket. The saying on the shirt read: “Not affiliated with anybody” or “I’ve got a bad attitude; what’s your point?” Something fresh, brash like that.

When I got to the checkout monster, I was told, “This isn’t our shirt.” I hadn’t been so shocked since I learned that a business associate of mine did not have a mail slot; meaning that the Post Office was blameless in “The Case of the Missing Novel.”

“So whose shirt is it?” we all asked in unison, without a single rehearsal.

The likely scenario goes something like this: a thief walks into Wal-Mart wearing a clean but inexpensive t-shirt. He or she tries on a super-heavy, wool, hunter’s shirt, like an L.L. Bean kind of comfy shirt-jacket-coat. And then the thief puts the cheapo t-shirt (the one I’m wearing now) back on the hanger and walks out wearing the $69 comfy shirt.

Wal-Mart let me keep the “What’s your point?” t-shirt since it wasn’t theirs, ever. It was like a pack of mustard that fell on the floor; “If you want it, take it.” That’s when I first knew that crazy stuff goes on in that company. I mean, who gets hosed for $3B a year? Who has that much of value lying around, out in the open, so easy to steal? Only Wal-Mart and the IRS have $3B to hoist. It’s like the thieves are Goodfellas and Wal-Mart is Lufthansa Airlines. Oscar Wilde said something about carelessness and it applies here, I’m sure.

Now, don’t get all anti-academic on me. I just snuck in a Wilde reference because it gives the illusion I’m versatile in my readings. I am not. I am versatile in my writings, sure. But I’m not well-read. Probably because I’d rather write than read. Maybe it shows. At least I’m not typing, “It is what it is” on every page, like Jack Torrance in “The Shining.”

So, Robert Frost once told a guy I knew … I used to hate namedroppers, too, until I started meeting semi-famous people like Adam West and Ruth Buzzi and the crazy train ghost in “Ghost.” (Mr. Schiavelli was a nice guy.) That’s when I started to namedrop, but only to amuse my friends when they came to visit me in L.A. Before long, my friends stopped visiting me in L.A.

To compare and contrast, I make 100 new friends a year on the East Coast. In my seven years in L.A., I made four. I still speak to two. I hear that’s pretty good, considering.

Back to Anthony Schiavelli. It was in the late 1970’s and I remember being a starving writer. By starving, I mean that I had spent all day at Santa Anita Race Track and had forgotten to eat, what with all the winning and losing and questionable activities involved. So I stopped at an old-fashioned restaurant on Pico Blvd, called The Apple Pan, on my way back to the beach. The Apple Pan’s motto was, “Quality Forever,” which is second all-time in my book to Kelchner’s (cocktail sauce) company motto, “When it can be made better, we will make it.” Gosh, I love that motto and I don’t usually love mottos.

So, I sat down at the counter of The Apple Pan which had about six items on the menu; hamburger, apple pie … and four more things. And the guy sitting next to me was the train ghost from “Ghost” although he hadn’t made the movie “Ghost” at that point in time. He had been in an Academy Award winning film years earlier, though, and I recognized him from his role with Jack Nicholson in “One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest.” Anthony Schiavelli played a mental patient in that film, along with Danny DeVito and Christopher George, among others. I reached down to my belt loop for my cell phone, to call everyone back home and say, “I’m sitting here with that nut-job with the skinny head from ‘Cuckoo’s Nest’ and he seems like a really nice, normal guy” but then I realized cell phones hadn’t been invented yet and, even if they had been, I don’t keep my cell phone in my belt loop.

OK, I admit I’m a namedropper. But it has to be an interesting name, like Mr. Anthony Schiavelli.

-- Don Rutberg