Tuesday, November 30, 2010

At 85 mph, I can get positively philosophical, and when I hit my favorite cruising velocity last week, weaving in and out of Thanksgiving traffic, it occurred to me I was participating in a great reshuffling of the American people. Certainly I recall Memorial Day traffic and the sheer volume of cars associated with it, but it didn’t hold a candle to this. This was an event to which I was party, and one of my driving excursions led me back to my cultural touchstone. Also, to be perfectly clear, the 85 mph pertained to the freeway and not the parking lot.

The supermarket was largely unchanged. It smelled the same. The wares were familiar. I also made it a point to confirm my customer archetypes, and I wasn’t disappointed at all. There on a shelf near the checkout lanes lounged the same carved Buddhas, chief among them a particularly big one with extra-large nipples priced at a hundred bucks. It was a potent omen, for the lore of the Far East tells of how his prodigious mammaries would swell whenever the lotus harvest was especially bountiful. I’m just fuckin’ with you, obviously–I think the statue was closer to, like, a couple hundred bucks.

Now, while I didn’t feel any appreciable amounts of kinship to anything in the store, exit doors notwithstanding, I can safely say I disliked the place less. Could I be softening? Am I becoming a model U.N. unto myself? Perhaps. Indeed, I even bought a pack of noodles, authentic in the indecipherable scrawl across its wrapper, and even now it sits in my pantry, waiting for– What, acceptance? I’m not sure. But I pretty much consumed about half an apple pie in preparation, partly because it was delicious and partly because I needed a counterweight to help right my cultural scale.