Why I love grocery shopping

Ever heard of the idea of eternal return?  It has been referenced in countless works in pop culture.  It's in The Matrix, Groundhog Day, and The Never Ending Story.  It's in the first line of Peter Pan and a major theme of the excellent TV show Battlestar Galactica.  It is the idea of cyclical patterns in the universe.  "All of this has happened before and all this will happen again."  Sounds very dramatic.  And poetic.

In a similar way, it's like saying that history repeats itself.  And in yet another way, it's like reading something from a long time ago and being surprised to learn that we can identify with it.  I remember being shocked in reading The Canterbury Tales.  Some of those characters could have made themselves at home at any trailer park.  Because the way human beings behave now is not so different from the way they behaved hundreds or thousands of years ago.  We are still innately selfish, we still make war, and we still do stupid things in the name of love. 

So when I was reading this poem by Allen Ginsberg, his feelings about the world he was living in are not so different from the way people view the world today.

A Supermarket in California

What thoughts I have of you tonight, Walt Whitman, for I walked
down the sidestreets under the trees with a headache self-conscious looking
at the full moon.
In my hungry fatigue, and shopping for images, I went into the neon
fruit supermarket, dreaming of your enumerations!
What peaches and what penumbras! Whole families shopping at
night! Aisles full of husbands! Wives in the avocados, babies in the tomatoes!
--and you, García Lorca, what were you doing down by the watermelons?

I saw you, Walt Whitman, childless, lonely old grubber, poking
among the meats in the refrigerator and eyeing the grocery boys.
I heard you asking questions of each: Who killed the pork chops?
What price bananas? Are you my Angel?
I wandered in and out of the brilliant stacks of cans following you,
and followed in my imagination by the store detective.
We strode down the open corridors together in our solitary fancy
tasting artichokes, possessing every frozen delicacy, and never passing the
cashier.

Where are we going, Walt Whitman? The doors close in a hour.
Which way does your beard point tonight?
(I touch your book and dream of our odyssey in the supermarket and
feel absurd.)
Will we walk all night through solitary streets? The trees add shade
to shade, lights out in the houses, we'll both be lonely.
Will we stroll dreaming of the lost America of love past blue automo-
biles in driveways, home to our silent cottage?
Ah, dear father, graybeard, lonely old courage-teacher, what America
did you have when Charon quit poling his ferry and you got out on a
smoking bank and stood watching the boat disappear on the black waters of
Lethe?

--Berkeley, 1955

To understand this poem, you have to understand that Ginsberg liked to invoke Whitman when he was writing.  Whitman was almost like his muse, and Whitman's poems were usually of an observational nature.  He connected to things, people, nature, which is what he's doing in the supermarket in this poem.  He's interacting with the products, with the grocery clerks, while Ginsberg watches from a distance.  Ginsberg feels disconnected from all these things going on around him and all the people.  He can only connect with poets who have long since died (García Lorca was a Spanish poet who was murdered in the Spanish Civil War).  At the end of this poem, Ginsberg longs for the past and these poets' idealized versions of it that they wrote about.  In the supermarket, where he is "shopping for images" (Oh, Allen, I've been there),  he is bombarded by the busyness, all the choices of "neon fruit," and "brilliant stacks of cans," but he can't find what he wants.  He feels lonely and separate from the modern world.

Upon reading this, it made me think about how accurately that still portrays America today.  We are often listening to our iPods or on our cell phones when we are shopping.  We do this when we drive or ride the subway.  We avoid connecting with the people around us, whether it's out of fear or selfishness.  Sometimes if we're caught sitting at a table with a group of people all on their blackberries, we stop and reflect on this and someone will say that they yearn for a simpler time.  What simpler time was that?

Am I becoming a misanthrope?

It all started last Thursday around 6:30 pm.  I was in my bedroom getting ready to go out and meet some friends for dinner when I heard five rapid gunshots.  No one else was around, so I took a moment to think.  First, were those really gunshots?  Sometimes the neighborhood kids set off fireworks, and the two can sound remarkably similar.  But I didn't hear any other fireworks.  Second, where did the sound come from?  I went to the living room window that looks onto the street and peeked out.  I didn't see anything.  I went back to my room upon the realization that if they were gunshots, maybe I shouldn't be standing next to the window.

About five minutes later I started to hear police sirens and a helicopter.  It's not that unusual to hear those sounds in my 'hood.  In fact, almost nightly I shout at my ceiling at passing helicopters to hurry up and find the perp already because their noise is drowning out my TV (this is either misanthropy sign #1 or a sign that I'm turning into an old person).  So upon hearing these sounds, I said to myself, if the cops drive past and the sirens fade away, then I'm going to assume it was fireworks.  But they didn't drive past.  The sirens stopped at the southern end of my block.  Great.

It was at that point I wished that my intrepidly curious downstairs neighbor was around.  He would have gone outside with me to see what was going down.  I was too scared to go alone in case some gang war was taking place.  About a half hour later, I had to leave the house anyway to meet my friends.  I saw cars coming up from that end of the block, so I decided to drive that way.  When I got to the cross street, there was a cop car blocking the way and one entire corner was roped off with police tape.  Yikes.  I turned around and drove in a different direction, but that shook me up.

My roommates always tease me because it's actually kind of common for me to think I hear gunshots.  One time I was so sure that I made everyone get down on the ground and belly crawl, but that one turned out to be just a firework.  This was real.

I thought back to the walk I had taken to the bank the day before.  There had been some MS-13 tagging I passed along the way.  Was it new?  We always joke about our neighborhood being up-and-coming (at least for the last 3 years since we moved here), but what if it had suddenly gone the other direction?  This was the first time I had ever felt unsafe.

Cut to this morning when I was working on some writing and someone buzzed the doorbell three times.  I peeped out the peep hole.  No one inside the building (meaning it wasn't maintenance or my landlord).  I looked outside.  If it was UPS or FedEx, I would see a truck.  No truck.  The doorbell rang another three times.  Well, who the hell could that be?  None of my neighbors were home.  My imagination was running away with me.  I thought back to a news story in Memphis when I lived there about a local DJ being shot in the head just because she opened her apartment door to a stranger.  Again the buzzer rang three times.  I decided not to answer it.  What calm and logical solution did I come up with instead?  I turned on the shower.  And then I decided to get in.  There.  That was my excuse for not answering the door.  If anyone asked later, it was because I was in the shower.

Later I had to go to the police station to take care of a traffic violation, but while I was there I decided to get some serious info.  I told the very friendly desk officer that I had heard gun shots on my street but I couldn't find anything about what had happened.  Was there a shooting on my street?  He looked at me and said, "Probably."  Probably?!  According to him, "It happens a lot.  You're at home and you hear something and you think, was that a gun?  In this neighborhood, chances are it was."

Well, that's just dandy.  I am going to become like Emily Dickinson and never leave my house and never answer the door.  I already rarely answer my phone (that's another story), so this won't be that big of a leap for me.

I never hear the word "escape"

I never hear the word "escape"
Without a quicker blood,
A sudden expectation,
A flying attitude.

I never hear of prisons broad
By soldiers battered down,
But I tug childish at my bars, --
Only to fail again!

-Emily Dickinson