Do they have the grocery store in heaven?

The crazy you get from too much choice

In the tea aisle of Lassens where I have been standing for eight and a half minutes, Christian Lee Hutson sings in my ears: There are billboards in heaven, and 7-11s. I turn it up to overpower the altercation brewing at the front of the store. There’s a man on the phone calling whoever’s on the other end of the line a faggot over and over again. Another is loading a comical amount of glass bottles of water into his cart, exchanging heated words with the redhead behind him. “You’re making it everyone’s problem, dude,” says the redhead, pushing his glasses up his nose. It’s hard to act tough when you look a little like Chuckie Finster but he is giving it his all. I don’t know what they are fighting about but when they start verbally threatening each other with physical violence I put my head down and keep walking.

All night, I’ve been burning like a low-grade fever, bubbling under the residual heat of the lights in my apartment, all of which have been turned off for hours, so I peel myself off the floor and walk down the street to that sweet sweet oasis in my desert wasteland city. If I got to personally design heaven it would be a grocery store. I fucking love the grocery store. I guess it represents possibility, a single vessel for the building blocks of any recipe. You need a keen eye to eke these things out, though, I tell myself. Food is greater than the sum of its parts, I tell myself, and actually believe. I learned to cook in my late teens as a concerted effort of exposure therapy to cure my anorexia. It didn’t really work but at least now I have a skill, as well as the constant benevolent presence of my true love the grocery store.

I have not always loved the grocery store. A child of the early aughts, I had no good examples for how to relate to food. I knew how to read a nutrition label before I could read books. Like all lifetime latchkey kids, I became particularly adept at the after-school routine: ungodly snack prepared by unwashed hands (Saltines with honey drizzled on top come to mind), eaten sitting on the countertop, book I wasn’t allowed to read pressed down with my knees to avoid stickying the pages. Food was a hurdle to be cleared. Pleasure was something to be attained in solitude, before I heard Mom’s keys rattling in the door and I dashed upstairs to my bedroom where I’d sit quietly on my knees and pray to God or my Taylor Swift posters that I hadn’t left behind any evidence that I lived in the house at all. Sometimes when I’m in the grocery store trying to decide between the 2% and the 1% Greek yogurts I lose myself to a rabbit hole of parallel truths, that these are memories of standard adolescent asociality and that my childhood was, simply put, not standard, and I am under no obligation to pretend it was. I am under no obligation to play defense for the people for hurt me to the judge/jury/executioner of my mind. I try to hold both these things in my hands at once but they rub together like Styrofoam and I forget that I can only buy one container of Greek yogurt.

For a while, the grocery store, like restaurants or dinner parties, was like porn. There is a list of attributes we have all agreed upon as desirable. Crunchy greens, crisp apples, tomatoes and sausages with skin that snap. Creamy sauces with flecks of spices and herbs. Waiters who fret over you, who notice an untouched plate and worry you aren’t enjoying the food (and of course you aren’t, but through no fault of the kitchen). Crisp white napkins meant to be soiled. Salt fat acid heat. So out of touch with my own desires, I knew about this list only through a shotty game of telephone.

Now I pace the aisles and pretend I am a private chef to a beautiful young woman who happens to live in an apartment that looks just like mine. This young woman in my mind has a job like mine, one that keeps her busy and her body always tired at the end of the day. She works nights and weekends and stays up late poking the smoldering embers of her various creative enterprises with a stick. As a nanny, I’m well acquainted with caring for others, far more so than caring for myself. I can cook for her, feed her, because she is not me.

To offer to yourself after spending a decade in artificial scarcity is a difficult mountain to scale, so sometimes instead I spend hours in the grocery store, steeped in possibility, untouchable by mess and practicality and actual consumption. I am a clean girl with a slicked back bun in the grocery store. I could go to pilates later. I could drink coconut water. I could set up camp amongst the dry goods and never leave.

Whether or not you believe in the eternal power of the written word to change the world, and I do, such a belief does not exist when you’re doing the actual writing, or at least, it definitely doesn’t for me. It doesn’t exist on the couch hunched over your laptop after you finally put the kids to bed. It doesn’t exist at the stoplight vomiting your thoughts into your notes app. I write because I love it; I love the act of it as much as I love getting people to care about what I think. But the ego necessary to convince oneself that their thoughts ought to be committed to paper is inextricable from the process, and wherever I write there is a little voice in my head that says “shut up shut up this does not matter at all.”

I don’t know if that voice is me, or a shitty ex-boyfriend, or even some imagined version of my mom (who would never say that to me), but it certainly does not live in my kitchen. To me, a devout home cook, food is the artform least burdened by ego. Cooking is humble; it’s an offering. At the end of the process, you have made something with your hands, something you can offer to those you love. I’m a good host at least in part because I’m very type A, and I’m incurably nervous. Even at other people’s parties I find myself running around refilling drinks and lighting cigarettes. I will always offer to go out for ice. I will go out for ice for my imagined beautiful girl who is just like me, to whom I am the private chef.

The song ends and the chaos from the front of the store leaks into my ears in the interim. That guy calls someone a faggot again. Get out of my happy place! You can’t say faggot in my mind palace! I turn off the indie folk and put on a playlist of meditative frequencies. I don’t know the science behind that shit, or if there even is any, so it kind of just sounds like ambient music to me.

By the time I reach the produce aisle I am totally blissed out. Whether it’s the meditative frequencies or the sight of pure unblemished radicchio, I don’t care. I’m going to make a meal for the beautiful girl later, in her apartment that looks just like mine; it will be complex and bright and seasonally appropriate. I’m going to sweat a little over the stove in her galley kitchen, delighting in the sensuality of doing something with my hands, making something for the beautiful girl. Then she’s going to sit at her dining room table, the one from the house she grew up in, the one her family never ate at, and she’s going to eat there and it’s going to feel like an orgasm. It’s going to feel better than an orgasm.

good ass peach

from my annual christmas cookie boxes. sweet potato cookie w marshmallows… so good

yeah i just went in my camera roll and searched “food”. what’s it to you?