So, as you might imagine, this new CVS will be the point around which my mental landscape revolves for the next few days. On that note, I've already begun to make cutting new observations about my new drugstore-based lifestyle.

For example, have you heard of "HomeGoing" cards? Last night I found myself shopping for a "dear Grandpa, sorry your three-legged cat got torn apart by stray dogs" card (yes, really — I had to settle for "condolences on the loss of your pet", which could be talking about anybody but will have to do). But in the midst of perusing the card aisle I came across a sizable selection of HomeGoing cards (they even had their own separate section in the card aisle). A little investigation shows that these are condolence cards, and it doesn't take a genius to figure out that the term is meant to imply that the deceased has gone to heaven. But I had never heard the word HomeGoing before.

The internet doesn't have much to say about it, either. Wikipedia just turns up references to individuals' HomeGoings, and the top google hit is a press release from a disreputable rightwing media outlet. That's not much to go on.

So is this something new? Is it yet another way for evangelical Christians to turn half of America into a secret society that can snicker at us until Rapture O'Clock? Is this some repopularized archaic term that I've simply never heard of, but which has a long and appropriately humorless Protestant history? Or has (Hall)market research simply shown that people buying cards about death don't like to think about death? Right now I'm leaning toward the first or third explanations — "HomeGoing" sounds a little too much like a made-up religious observance from Battlestar Galactica for me to think that Pilgrims came up with it. But for all I know it might actually be funereal cosplay: I didn't check inside any of the cards for references to the Lords of Kobol, but I wouldn't be surprised to find them.