Charmed Life

I sense that I am leading a charmed life (to paraphrase Jad Fair). I know it. I feel it lurking next to me as I stand amid the banana display at the local Korean market near my apartment. I need the bananas as part of my new BRA_ diet (see previous entry). My new eastern medicine expert, Jennifer X, called me earlier in the day and left a message updating me with the many applications of bananas for all that is ailing you. In the message, she expounded on the topical use of the banana skin to slow down hemorrhaging in gunshot wounds. She also described how to immerse a banana in liquid nitrogen, smash it with a hammer*, and then snort the cooled shards in order to create a long-term appetite suppressant. Jennifer X. loves bananas.

I stand over the display of bunches of bananas not entirely convinced that this is exactly where I want to be. I am in a walking daze from a weekend of stomach flu and bad sleep, yet I still feel a bit of surging mirth from some distant station. It must be that I am past the worst of it and I am back to fulfilling my duties as a twenty-first century conspicuous consumer guy. I love this part. I buy something. I push back the other stuff. At these moments, the lyrics to my favorite ode to shopping come to mind:

“(I'm in love with the girl who works at the store where I'm nothing but a ...)

Customer-I'm a customer-I'm a customer-I'm a customer

How about cigarettes? I'll take sugarless-You sell waterbeds?

I'm a customer-I'm a customer-I'm a customer

Yeah, can I get change? Where're the twinkies? What's on sale?

I'm a customer-I'm a customer-I'm a customer

I love you”**

Paul Westerberg spoke more to my existential calamity as a content captive of consumption in that 1 minute and 30 seconds than many who have come before or after. And hey-what’s with the alliteration? If a captive is content with his consumption, what does that say about his conscience? Anyone? No. I need to stop this. Paul Westerberg and bananas- I need to keep my focus. No Replacements. Just bananas. I drift back to the present and stare at the wrapped bunches again. I am more than a customer. You people know me-right? I come in here all the time to buy my avocados and seltzer. There’s the older Korean woman behind the counter who always asks: “How are you?” even though there is little else in her English language palette to reach for once some replies with something other than the usual pleasantries.

Her: How are you?

Me: I am good. It’s warm evening tonight. I saw a robin today. Spring is here.

Her: Yes. Yes.

Me: I think that these pomegranates are ripe-right?

Her: Yes. Yes.

Me: I can’t feel my extremities. I think I have been shot. Do you have any bananas?

Her: Yes. Yes.

I look over to her as I stare at the fruits and she smiles. I have no idea how long I have been standing here. It could have been a few seconds or maybe as long as a minute. I feel a twinge of embarrassment. I go to work looking for the right bunch. The problem with choosing your bunch of bananas has something to do with amount in a bunch versus their greenness. If I get too many bananas they will all ripen at the same time and we will never eat all of them before they start their breakdown, their awful breakdown where they release that putrid ethylene alcohol odor in the kitchen. Thinking of this odor reminds me of the mulch piles of my youth. My father maintained the mulch pile on the edge of our property in order to provide the crows, raccoons, possums, deer, squirrels, and neighborhood dogs and cats a place to congregate and parse through the goings-on with the latest neighborhood garbage container technology. Yes, those creatures sure loved those discarded chicken carcasses and melon skins and banana peels. Bananas. I look up again and realize that the stocking assistant is staring at me from the back room. Damn it. I feel blood rise to my face. I grab a bunch from the top of display. They’re green. I don’t care. I need to get out of here before I embarrass myself again. I pay for my bananas and leave the market.

I stand outside the market and feel a sense of accomplishment. I’ve got the bananas now and it’s only matter of time before I am at the top of my game again. I look down at my plastic bag of bananas and wonder to myself why I bought so many bananas. I wish we had a mulch pile.

*Banana in Liquid Nitrogen Quicktime Movie (scroll down)

**And the Replacements from a 1981 show tearing through a slightly longer and definitely sloppier version of " Customer":