We’re fragile creatures. Strange vats of seething electrochemical energy. Static meat animated by static. You get one thing off and the whole creature goes a little bit mad. Not enough sleep, too much sleep, too much sun, too little darkness, too many drinks, not enough sex, calcium, vitamins A through Zinc and sometimes Y, where Y is just an absolutely unidentifiable variable that takes a normal, functioning member of society and sends them reeling off the tracks, deep into some psychosis.
And then everything in between.
I’m having trouble coping. I can’t break down at the Safeway because it would downright freak Kristen out, but I feel the edge of panic, of tears, of just not being able to FUNCTION as I should.
It’s the world. It’s the heat. It’s something in between. It’s not having played enough or the let-down after having played too much. Our systems are too complex, and there’s no good and proper self-diagnostic we can run. Right-click on the rob and tell me your troubles.
I’m doing the best I can, but it feels like I’m just killing time and that there’s no REAL reason to be doing so – because I’m past the point of it mattering.
I’m at the safeway and the Marginals are here. Whether returning carts of begging for handouts – they’re not terribly different – but one has the authority of their Safeway badge and the other doesn’t and so there’s a quiet, muttered conversation with one guy repeating “you shouldn’t be here, you can’t be here, you shouldn’t be here, you can’t be here” while blocking the entrance to the Safeway with a half dozen carts, shaking his head a precise 30 degrees… the guy squatting in the shade next to the automatic door keeps saying “I’m just waiting for a ride man, I’m just waiting for a ride”.
I sort of wish Kristen and I had NOT been talking about Westworld on the way in. Now these two read as nothing more than broken robots. People slowly make their way in through the unblocked exit, peeling carts off the stalled queue.
Grateful to be in the air conditioning, I have a moment of whimsy as I encounter a guy …shelving parsley? That’s probably not the right term. But he’s got the cart of parsley, and the vegetable racks are completely parsley-free – but he’s not quite ready to put the parsley in it’s place just yet because he’s holding the parsley aloft before him, Hamlet-esque, admiring it at head height, carefully plucking errant sprigs off the bunch.
Yes. Parsley’s priced per bunch.
I don’t know if this is aesthetic or shrinkflation or just a way of whiling away the hours in an hourly position. As I duck in to nab what seems to be similarly-downsized green onions, he asks “And how are YOU today sir?”
I tell him “I’m admiring the eye of the artist” and nod towards his carefully-hewn herb – but he insists “Aw, no man, it ain’t like that”. I tell him “Heh, they look BEAUTIFUL” and move on. I guess having broached the human interaction envelope now I become… a target?
As an open mic host I often have the task of interacting with people forcibly. To host I’ve got to chat, and sometimes the information is not forthcoming, so I’ve gotten quite used to going up to people I don’t know and having awkward interactions because SOMETIMES they are legit lost, NOT just wondering how to sign up. Sometimes their idea of poetry is terrifying and anti-Semetic and involves waving a knife around. Sometimes they’re just shy.
And as my father’s son, I seem to also have a desire for interacting with the rest of my species, but as my own me I DO seem to have an unerring instinct for picking the weird ones.
I hear another voice from behind me : “Hey man, I’ve got a good joke… wanna hear it?”
Now – as an open mic host I know comedy rarely goes well. In a masked supermarket environment though, I also feel like we’re increasingly isolated and someone THIS desparate to make contact with another human should NOT be ignored – besides – he’s probably NOT talking to m- oh, yup, totally talking to me.
An older man with a smile only half-filled with teeth follows me around the bananas and towards the tomatoes asking “So… if they held a foot race… from Baltimore to Annapolis” (I gesture like a running person with my fingers to show him I’m listening while examining cherry tomatoes) “and two women are running” (running fingers become two fingers held up… yup, still with you, just need some maters tho) “and one’s a straight woman and one’s a gay woman” (uh oh – grab any ole tomatoes) “who’s gonna win?”
“Who’s gonna win? The gay or the straight?”
Shall I die on the hill of “look man, there’s no way this goes well, you should quit while you’re ahead – right here by the lettuce – now see, THAT’S funny!”… no, no I shall not.
“Uhm, there’s no way this goes well – but straight lines are always the short-“
“Naw, the gay woman cause she’ll be all LICKETY SPLIT!”
There was no good recovery from this and I just tell him that I shall probably NOT be repeating that one and move right along. I’m very grateful he didn’t follow me around with additional humourous interludes.
Between broken robots and a focus on legumes, it takes me a while to pay attention to the increase in prices since the last time I was here, and though this is nothing new (indeed, it was a couple of months ago when I realized that for the first time in many, many years, I was altering my behaviour based on what I was comfortable spending) today it weighs on me.
I know it’s in combination with the uncertaintly of what our housing situation’s going to be in the next couple of months. I know I’m not hurting but parting my clients with their money, even for executed contracts, seems increasingly hard. I know the stress is in combination with how that situation is dragging forward with, at the moment, the ball entirely in the landlord’s court. I also CERTAINLY know that my capacity for Living here, there, anywhere… of scraping together a successful mortgage application – none of that’s going to be effected by spending $50 more or less on groceries – but it gets in my head.
Have I bought roast beef for the last time? Will my bandkids grow up not knowing the same flavours I grew up with because it’s priced out of their reach?
I have flashback memories to 2009, watching my health insurance increase month after month after month till finally I realize I’m going to have to drop it soon – JUST in time for the ACA to step in and provide a solution.
And there’s a safety net for food. Kristen and I probably, frankly, could and should take advantage of SNAP, but the idea of truly collapsing into the societal safety net intended for those who DIDN’T make the choice to be artists, cellists, freelance musicians, seems absolutely wrong… especially cause we can still ABSOLUTELY afford sandwich meat… just not THAT sandwich meat. And holy shit have you SEEN the price of ketchup? And we’re going to put off peanut butter till we can buy it from a discount place online…
It’s two in the afternoon on a Wednesday. Maybe I should EXPECT the Marginals to be out in force. The ones carefully counting and recounting the cans. The ones ranting on their phones about not buying the GOVERNMENT CORN.
Or maybe they actually DON’T have a bluetooth earpiece in and they’re just ranting.
There’s a woman in the bread aisle too beautiful to be shopping here with the Regular People, so painfully-shaped that I can only look at her for a moment lest I stare, but everyone else’s eyes follow her and I wish I could abandon myself to gawking, but that’s the creeping of Instagram, not the interaction of everyday Life.
I’m too old and fat to make eye contact with people like that. I’m here for jokes about lesbians and carefully sculpted leafy greens.
When it’s finally time to check out, the woman ahead of us is neurotic and shaking. She asks the price of each item twice, double-counts her spaghetti sauce, double-checks that the coupons are applied. She’s far closer to the ledge of whatever edge we humans all occupy than I am, and I am grateful that though we’re cautious with what we spend, either we’re a lot better off than she is or at the very least we’re a LOT better at doing math BEFORE we place items in the cart.
She loses the olive oil, she loses the pickles. She loses the fight over whether the sale on Ragu should change the price on Prego. We check out. I have token interactions with Joey at the register (some other Joey, not OUR Joey, we’ve told him our drummer’s name is Joey in ANOTHER token interaction… I NEED to talk to people and humanize us all since we’re only half-faces… ) and we walk out the now-unblocked doors.
The woman ahead of us in line is also the woman parked next to us, now furiously gesturing with an already-smoked-to-the-filter cigarette as she and another woman sit in the car jabbing angrily at their receipt. There’s more shaking. We pull away as the second woman is yelling into her phone.
Everyone’s so fucking angry and desparate and maybe they’re poor or maybe they didn’t sleep well enough or maybe it’s just too fucking hot.
And I have to hold it together because no matter what kind of shit I’M going through, it’s not as bad as these strange, desparate Lives going on around me. But damn I often wish I wasn’t smart enough to realize that.