Sean of the South By Sean Dietrich New in town

ask) pitchforks.

I go to the hardware store four or five times per day, sometimes more. Sometimes I don’t even buy anything, I just wander the aisles wearing a helpless look, glancing at my wife’s list in a way that causes concerned employees to sidle up to me and ask if I need a chaplain.

Then an employee leads me to an aisle where my item is located and I am forced to choose between an infinity of options, colors, and denominations.

Do you want the one with the five-eighths angled grommet, or the eleven-sixteenths one with the reinforced brackets? Do you want galvanized or powder coated? Or would you like the three-quarter nodule with the all-weather defibrillator and the reverse coupling ribbed flange?

Nothing is easy in the hardware store anymore.

Take lightbulbs. Used to, buying light bulbs was a snap. Your mom bought them at the supermarket. She simply tossed a box of bulbs into her buggy with her non-smoking hand and kept on trucking.

Back then, you had three kinds of bulbs to choose from — which were all the same bulb, but different wattages. The whole process took maybe 4 seconds.

Today, however, the hardware store has a lightbulb aisle that’s roughly the size of Newark. There are bulbs with different “lumens,” “finishes,” “contours,” “hues” and “shapes.”

You have incandescents, compact fluorescents, halogens, light emitting diodes, tubes, candles, globes, floodlights, spirals, Edisons, capsules, track lights, cool lights, white lights, warm lights, menthol lights, Miller Lites, etc.

And God help you if you buy the wrong bulb, because your wife will send you back to the hardware store. This is very embarrassing. When you re-enter through the pneumatic doors again, you immediately make eye contact with the same employees you saw a few minutes earlier, and you feel much like a neutered dog.

Then, one of the employees usually attempts to make you feel better by saying, “Listen, it’s not easy, shopping in this store, it’s overwhelming.”

Which makes you feel about as manly as a guy dressed in a Hello Kitty costume.

But hey, this is all part of the moving process. Moving means learning how to adjust to new situations, new experiences, and new highways.

Speaking of highways. I’m still driving, and