I-Land is where memories and experiences turn into short stories, personal journal entries and narration in first person, part memoir, part fiction, exploring topics such as the relation between humans and the societies they live in.

Pollution Aside, You’re Not An Octopus

‘Grocery shopping is a perilous task.’ ~ Pope Joconda

2020-something. Somewhere in consumerland…

Out the door early and down the road, across town for grocery shopping on a sunny Saturday morning in June (first mistake) and you think to yourself, It can’t be that bad, and then the guy in the tiny bubblegum car parks in the middle of the narrow driveway at the far end of the store to drop off his empty gas capsule, cutting you off. He takes his time, flips through his wallet, rips through tons of debris around his seat, finishes off a pastry, emerges from the car like a bear out of hibernation and ambles about his business while ten cars have lined up, waiting for him to get going.

Five minutes later (you’ve reversed and doubled round, having barely avoided the car behind you) you’re now ignoring a pair of parking attendants who point between an F-350 Lightning Ford and a rusty banged-up piece of shit that likes to collect paint from neighboring vehicles. Fuck their ignorant prompts. You can do better than this, so you find a slot at the edge of the parking area where you park nice and snazzy, lock your vehicle, grab a basket – not a cart, because you only want some milk and honey – and step inside the store… where a host of Saturday morning grocery-store characters shuffle around like runaway Frank Darrabonds of the Walking Dead persuasion, in search of victims to infect.

Here they come. First, the guy in the wife beater who loiters by the canned food section. Marinating in a cloud of his BO, he inspects each and every can with interest, and you zip by, holding your breath, turn a corner, down the aisle, turn again – and come face to face with the chin-bearded woman whose eyes are fixated on something she saw back in the ninth century, about which she reminisces every day. Look away, quick, before the thousand-year-stare eats you up.

There you go, rushing down the aisle, turning a corner and boom! – smack into the old couple that have camped in the middle of the aisle (are they related to the bubblegum-car bear?) to inspect the products in their cart.

You squeeze past them, muttering apologies, turn a couple more corners and grab a box of cereal and a bag of nachos on the way because you can never have enough cereal and nachos, and find yourself in the honey section, staring at plastic squeezies of Heymart Premium Clear Honey, and you think to yourself, ‘Cool, finally something that hasn’t turned to sugar,’ (most brands coagulate on the shelf – that’s how bad the climate control is). But upon closer inspection you find the liquid gold already crystallizing, and you wonder why, oh why you ever expected to find good honey here (second mistake), so you walk away, taken over by the urge to buy fresh fruit for cocktails.

You turn another corner and walk down another aisle where you find a middle-aged woman in a black dress and banana yellow shoes and a bright green handbag examining the artificial sweetener section (there’s an entire section of that stuff) and gawk at the sight, unable to move. A warning sign goes off in your head, you know you must flee this person, but the back of your throat shrivels. Something leaden flows down your limbs, you’re unable to turn. You get the whiff of purgatory, and you’re not sure if it’s a vivid memory that involves a holiday at the beach where your days and nights were spent with a questionably fashioned someone who had a weakness for artificial sweeteners, and whose time was spent on the toilet, expelling poorly digested food. It might be that, but then you spot the man in the wife beater coming round the corner, preceded by his cloud of stink. It punches you in the nostrils and your limbs unlock. With relief, you spring down the aisle to the dairy product fridge wall. Grab an extra-large container of mammary juice to last you till August. March to the alcohol section and grab a couple of Becks beers for breakfast and run to the fruit section where you’re met by a man in shorts so short that his balls are borderline dangling out, you can see a fuzzy wrinkly outline of scrotum, so you make a hard right, fast, away from this ungodly sight, and land into the veg section.

But you don’t want veg. You want fruit – bananas, limes, cherries, passion fruit, raspberries, blueberries, lychees – only now that you mention it, the lychees remind you of the balls you almost saw a moment ago, and that’s the end of your affair with lychees.

But you still want fruit, so you turn a corner and then another and another to come face to face with ripe, juicy cantaloupes, which you reach for at the same time two hairy hands attached to two furry arms reach for them, too. You turn to see a skinny, lanky, hairy dude feeling up those cantaloupes, making noises that sound like coughing and moaning, and you imagine grabbing the sleazy perv bastard by the neck and ramming his big head in the melons as hard as you can and leaving him sprawled and limp in the spillover before zipping to the sparkling water section where you unscrew a few bottles and shower yourself, the bubbles tickling your skin and burning your eyes. You wash away the stink of the wife beater and the moans of the hairy pervert and the creepiness of the vacant stare of the woman with the chin beard dreaming of dungeons with gimps, and head back to the fruit section where you grab some kiwis and limes and pineapples and make for the exit… only to run into the old couple who have moved away from their quiet corner by the dried fruit and nuts section, all the way to the middle of an intersection where they’ve parked again – as they do – to inspect their goods.

So you ram into these fuckers, boom! – sending them spinning like bowling pins, or at least that’s what you’d like to do, but you don’t. You just squeeze past them like before, muttering apologies, past the shampoos and shower gels, the sponges and housecleaning products, all the way to the cashier station where the cashier asks you for your club card for the umpteenth time (third mistake) and for the umpteenth time you tell them you don’t have one. And they ask for the umpteenth-plus-one time if you want to make one, and you lose it. How many times do you have to tell them that you have no club card, you’re not interested in getting one, you’d rather save money by buying less crap, or nothing at all! And they look at you like you’re a freak, wondering what ‘maybe another time’ means, and you grab the kiwis from the bagging assistant who’s already fondling your items, and who insists on placing one item in each plastic bag, one item per plastic bag (fourth mistake) as if there’s not enough plastic waste in the world. You grab the fruit from her and mumble something about conservation and practicality, something about eight damn bags for eight damn items. Pollution aside (a trivial issue, no doubt), you’re not an octopus, you tell her. Why the hell would you need eight bags for eight items? Plus the pollution (did you already mention that?) and all the plastic that keeps finding its way up the blowholes of porpoises, all the way to the top of agendas written up by the Greens and other genius radicals who pass laws that make life difficult for the average person while doing little to protect the environment. So you bag the items yourself – just two bags, as necessary – and shoot out the store, looking forward to going home.

But there they are again, the parking attendants, ushering you to your vehicle. They want a tip, and you’d give them a tip if they hadn’t tried to shove you in that black-hole slot between the Lightning and Rustbelt, so you turn back and wait for them to wander off before heading to your vehicle. You drop the bags in the passenger’s seat and chomp on a handful of nachos before kicking into reverse, and while you’re backing out – crash!

It’s the bubblegum car with the gas-capsule bear-man. Somehow he found a way to jam his pastry-chomping ass into you. He clambers out his tiny vehicle, yelling obscenities, mouth stuffed with something chewy, brow pinched, face glazed, and you’re thinking that your day’s about to get a lot worse. Why, or why didn’t you go to the beach instead, or to the park, or to the fkn dive bar, anywhere but grocery shopping in consumerland’s armpit on a sunny Saturday morning in June.