Grocery Store
no subtitle.
I’m at the grocery store. I’ve caved in to buying a new hair dye, to finally get rid of the remnants of homemade blonde. There are so many fucking shades of brown, I don’t know which one is closest to my natural color or even which one I like. “Uptown Brown,” I read aloud to the empty aisle. Medium ash brown. Deep dark brown. I look at the models on the boxes and try to imagine they are men, and from there decide which brown is the “most masculine.” Like that could even be meaningful. I settle on dark soft brown and move on.
The music in grocery stores always drives me insane and makes me feel incredibly dysphoric. Even if it’s something I like, like Duran Duran (always Rio) or Billy Idol I feel like it is corrupted playing over these speakers to this mass of people.
As I drive away, I notice a woman putting groceries in her car, and a party tray in the top part of her cart has opened and spilled. I desperately crane my neck to my rear mirror, praying to see the moment of her shock, her horror, her crushing disappointment, her seeing the cheese cubes spilled onto the asphalt, thinking of the fucking money she’s wasted. The disaster, the strawberries. I don’t see her reaction, though. Maybe she didn’t have one, maybe she didn’t even care. I hate her even more for that.
Off the access road I see an incredibly sunburned woman in an ugly neon tank top spinning a sign deftly for a new bullshit apartment complex. I think to myself that she deserves all the money in the world for such talents. Genuinely.
These days I oscillate wildly between disdain and tenderness. I release resentment like so many spores, but in the same hour I will defend these remaining crumbs of innocence and purity. I am cynical. I am nihilistic. I am deep in the throes of hedonism. I make a day of hurting myself. My ears and nostrils are full of mucus, and it flakes and powders off into the carpet of my car, my apartment.
I have the American impulse to disappear my problems, to wish for an over the counter pill to kill my ambitions so I can live the remainder of my life in relative contentedness, earning money and then pissing it away until I die. I feel this loss, and I feel the burning disappointment of my younger self, but my medication prevents me from giving too much of a shit about that. I am free from the guilt and stress that I would normally feel, and isn’t that wonderful? I can pursue my hedonism unbothered and untethered. It’s been a powerful journey, visible only to myself.