I took a deep breath as I was about to exit the car, because I’d been listening to a podcast about how the right-wing media has co-opted the party, and I realized that the sort of space I was in, was kinda this fuzzy distracted passive place, where really I would have been better off driving in silence so as to get my head together. But I hadn’t done that and so my head was not together.
As I walked toward T Joes to get my cart there was a guy standing near the trash can maybe reading a magazine, and he had on a traffic-safety-orange beanie and a studded leather eyepatch over his left eye and we locked eyes and I nodded to say hey I see you there and it’s cool that you have an eyepatch but I’m not going to say that out loud because it would be stupid since you know that and it’s a fact of your daily life, and he nodded back like hey brother I appreciate the nod.
I got my cart and went in and around the older lady standing there and realized there was an extra cart cleaning station so I took a sanitary wipe and wiped down the handle of my cart and the sides, where I sometimes grab the cart to pull it along and out of somebody’s way when they want to reach down and grab some of the seltzers, which is usually where I park the cart so I can just quickly grab items and return to basecamp without having to steer around a bunch of people.
Once I finished with the produce I moved my cart over to the eggs and dairy section and passed an Asian man with acne and an acne-scarred face that looked kind of callused over and reminding me of the sort of salami splotches I have on my arms between the freckles and the pale scars from all the mosquito bites I opened as a kid, and well anyways you’re not really supposed to like a face like that and besides you can’t just say hey man I like your acne-scarred face so I didn’t.
A young woman came out of the staff area and her pale face was round like a moon and she was sort of smiling in the same way that you see moons smile in illustrations, like the moon is kind of thinking about something funny but you’ll never know because the moon keeps secrets.
Then as I walked by the eggs one of the T Joe’s workers said to an older lady who was picking up eggs, “Good time to go vegan!,” which I think was a comment on how eggs are really expensive now, but I’m not sure the lady appreciated that comment because she didn’t say anything.
Then, then I saw Somebody Really Cool. She was a woman, a gen Xer, just very visibly ten or fifteen years older than me—you could see that she was starting to get a little bit lined, but she had makeup on to smooth things out and look kinda hip and young. And she was wearing jeans. Now I suspect that jeans are a sort of political topic among women and men too I guess, where usually women will have these tight hugging jeans that are slim all the way down or they’ll have hip huggers that emphasize their waists and sort of collect their muffin top (I have one, we all have one, it’s fine) into something cute and fashionable and thick, but then maybe sort of hang loose at the bottom and give a sort of free spirit type of vibe—
Anyways, this Really Cool Gen Xer did not have either of those types of jeans, she had just straight up jeans, off the rack jeans, clearance at K-Mart light blue denim jeans of the jeaniest, low-fashion variety, like you would see on your uncle as he gets out of his white van with the sticker of Calvin peeing on the words gun control next to the one that says piss off a liberal: work hard and be happy.
But she is clearly not your uncle who likes stickers because she has bright orange hair, like orange orange, as orange as your hair will allow you to have it, and it’s sort of pulled up in the back a bit but also hangs down loose at the sides in waves that obscure and reveal the sides of her face and her ears.
The piece de resistance is her leather jacket, which is embroidered with the main character from Aeon Flux being her bad self, which to be honest, I know nothing about since I am not a gen Xer and did not have cable at the time and most certainly would not have been allowed to watch Aeon Flux even though I did watch horror movies and I do remember watching a double feature with my (also gen Xer) brother of Ninja Scroll and The Exorcist where my mom came up during The Exorcist and said what are you watching even though she clearly knew and made us turn it off even though we had just watched Ninja Scroll, which is, in my estimation, worse.
But even though I know nothing about it, and even though it was obscured by her hair or another piece of clothing or something, I could tell it was the Aeon Flux main character and I could appreciate that this was an exceptionally cool jacket and pretty bold too, with Aeon Flux character as usual having a pretty in your face costume that seems to present her vagina as a pretty front-and-center aspect of her character design. And I wanted to say to Really Cool Gen Xer that this was a truly sick jacket, and her hair was sick as well, but she was with another woman who was wearing non-descript grey and black and a grey beanie and I felt that might be a bit awkward, to say how sick this jacket was when she was with somebody who was maybe just as sick as a person but not dressed quite as sickly.
And besides, again, I don’t know anything about Aeon Flux, and would have been forced to admit such, and maybe just say something about how I just admired the animation from afar, and dug the maybe-Moebius-style comic book boldness of it, and that I had watched Spawn once or twice on hotel cable but never managed to catch Aeon Flux, it having slipped me by almost entirely. So I just kept getting groceries and glancing at this leather jacket and orange hair between aisles.
My cashier was wearing the aforementioned hip-hugging muffin top jeans and had a sort of simple style that I appreciated, just her jeans and an olive T Joe’s tshirt that acted as a sort of one-two-three punch with her dark and wavy hair and her frankly unorthodox face that was pretty and simple in the same way as her clothes. I asked if I could bag for her and she had a very unorthodox way of saying she’d like that, but for the life of me I can’t remember what she said.
I went to the machine to put my card in and she started bagging and her accomplice returned to help her finish the bags. Now this guy is sort of a young guy maybe ten or so years younger than me, and he’s always had a sort of depressed vibe with his very pale skin and his very lanky body and his dark turtlenecks and his dark maybe greasy hair that sort of falls a bit unkempt around his face and past his eyes, kind of an incel look all told, though I’m not exactly sure how one can look like an incel. But today he was wearing a burgundy scarf, and it just tied everything together. And I was so pleased that whether through his own sense or the sheer cold of the day he had found something that so completed him, and he smiled as he bagged with the other cashier, who smiled back, and I wanted to tell him how much I liked that scarf on him, he honestly looked precious, but I was on the way out.
I got into my car and decided to drive with the podcasts off and the music off. I sat for a moment and wondered why do I find it so hard to tell people a nice thought I have about them. Maybe it would be unwanted. It would come off as flirty, or thirsty, or weird. Probably people want to do their grocery shopping in peace and quiet as quickly as possible, and any comment is just adding on to the time that they have to suffer the chore of picking up food items and placing them in a cart.
I pull out of the parking lot and drive past all the Google buildings and the apartments for the Google people and the running track for the Google people in the Google people apartments. I drive past a homeless guy or a guy with a sign anyways, and I don’t read the sign because I don’t think I’m going to give anything to this guy, because I don’t even know what’s in my wallet. So I don’t look at him at all. Then as he walks back and turns around to the sidewalk, I sneakily check into my wallet and discover I have a 5 dollar bill.
So I open the window and hold it out for him and he notices the open window and turns around. I tell him to have a blessed day, which I’m not religious but I always got a warm feeling when the old black church women would say that to me after I bagged their groceries at Giant Eagle. He is excited and grateful and says wow bro thank you thanks so much and I say you’re welcome man take care and then I start rolling up the window and I think he realized then that it was a 5 dollar bill and not a 1 because as he walks back toward the sidewalk he gets excited again and says oh wow thanks so much oh man wow.
I drive home in silence. I see another homeless guy with a sign that says Just Hungy Thanks, but I’m not sure I have another 5 dollar bill and I don’t look. I stop and start the car as I drive through Wilkinsburg and turn onto the pike. And I think about the beautiful people at Trader Joe’s and all the things they have to say.
Catstronaut Loves Games 