I was at the Safeway supermarket in St Kilda the other night getting some supplies. Normally I'm there with my two daughters or my two daughters and my wife. But on this particular night I was on my own. I could buy anything I wanted but the question Mick Jagger posed all those years ago was what did I need. I was momentarily dazzled by all the choices and the lack of children fighting and screaming near by. It was very much like that bit in The Hurt Locker. You do see single guys in the Safeway and they're all of a type. They never have baskets or carts and they do not have a shopping list or a plan. They cover a lot of territory moving from aisle to aisle and then back to the aisle they were just at a moment ago. If they can't find something they give up rather than ask for help. Women seem to have plans and shopping carts and an iron will and they move through the supermarket with ruthless efficiency like Rommel's Panzers in the eastern desert in early 1942. I wandered aimlessly for a while and I almost got a coffee cake but it had no bar code on it and I didn't want any kind of an incident at the checkout where they have to speak into the microphone and they hold up the coffee cake for everyone to see. So, anyway, coming out of the Safeway I found that I had purchased a large frozen pizza and a bottle of tequila. I think this is a classic guy move. I don't see many women walking home through the park with a frozen pizza and a bottle of tequila. Women passing by very much gave me a pitying sort of look but the men knew. Yes, the men knew. It was like that secret male code they talk about in Spaced.
Saturday, October 15, 2011
A Rare Guy Moment
I was at the Safeway supermarket in St Kilda the other night getting some supplies. Normally I'm there with my two daughters or my two daughters and my wife. But on this particular night I was on my own. I could buy anything I wanted but the question Mick Jagger posed all those years ago was what did I need. I was momentarily dazzled by all the choices and the lack of children fighting and screaming near by. It was very much like that bit in The Hurt Locker. You do see single guys in the Safeway and they're all of a type. They never have baskets or carts and they do not have a shopping list or a plan. They cover a lot of territory moving from aisle to aisle and then back to the aisle they were just at a moment ago. If they can't find something they give up rather than ask for help. Women seem to have plans and shopping carts and an iron will and they move through the supermarket with ruthless efficiency like Rommel's Panzers in the eastern desert in early 1942. I wandered aimlessly for a while and I almost got a coffee cake but it had no bar code on it and I didn't want any kind of an incident at the checkout where they have to speak into the microphone and they hold up the coffee cake for everyone to see. So, anyway, coming out of the Safeway I found that I had purchased a large frozen pizza and a bottle of tequila. I think this is a classic guy move. I don't see many women walking home through the park with a frozen pizza and a bottle of tequila. Women passing by very much gave me a pitying sort of look but the men knew. Yes, the men knew. It was like that secret male code they talk about in Spaced.
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46 comments:
I trust you had limes at home to go w/ the pizza & tequila.
I'm listening to the audio version of Jim Harrison's new book, "The Great Leader" and wonder about your opinion of Harrison and that book. I'm REALLY enjoying it.
A quote from "The Great Leader" apropos your comments about men:
The 65-year old main character is think about the sex he just finished with a younger woman, and says, "There should be a legion of pollsters asking all the men in the world what an ass means to them."
Speedskater
The day this house lacks for limes or lime juice will be a sorry one.
Jim H?
Havent read the new one but I liked The Woman Lit By Fireflies which if I recall correctly was two or three different novellas and they were all pretty good.
Good post, but you've got it slightly wrong. It's not women who have the ability to logisticize a supermarket. It's anyone who is the one in charge of the meals of small children or who for some perverse reason like to feed large groups of other people.
I wander around supermarkets much as you do. I mean substitute beer for tequila and maybe coffee for pizza. After that, it's pretty random. Last night I went to the local CVS for beer and ended up with a sleep shirt and some socks in the basket. Also beer, though that is weird because every once in awhile they ask, what is your birth year? I have no idea what this accomplishes apart from making me seem as old as Grandma Moses to the college students standing behind me.
It should be a je refuse kind of moment, but unfortunately, I apparently am willing to risk more for beer than you are for coffee cake.
Sounds like party time down your end of St Kilda. I trust you had the salt and lemon at home already.
Seana
You're right if I had to make it through some teenage hipster asking for my ID I probably would never buy any booze.
David
I had a bag of limes from someone's tree. It must be awesome to have a lime tree. Or an orange tree.
CVS is very creepy, but oddly the staff are very nice and not at all what you would call hipsters. In fact, I often think that I am seeing a very different side of Santa Cruz than I do downtown. Although there are a lot of student customers, who are the same as students everywhere.
One cannot buy beer in CVSs in Pennsylvania. The one near me is open 24 hours and is far less creepy than the Dunkin Donuts just a few doors down.
======================
Detectives Beyond Borders
"Because Murder Is More Fun Away From Home"
http://www.detectivesbeyondborders.blogspot.com/
CVS came to California after they bought out Longs. No one likes them. But there isn't a whole lot of choice. It's kind of like if Crown Books had won the chain war.
Longs was sinking themselves, however. They remodeled so as to make everyone feel like they had just boarded a space ship and not in a good way. CVS tore all that out of course. They went back to that old reliable, kitsch. It's a time warp.
Peter, Seana
Not even a whiff of a CVS in my neck of the woods which is a pity because the one in Denver used to have all these cheap drugs and candy in a big bucket by the till.
Adrian, CVSs have turned into little supermarkets (it's a big trend in American retailing since you've been away.) This could increase your opportunities for guy moments at all hours of the day if you come back to America.
Another bloke in a 'supermarket' moment:
Friday night a mini-market in London. Bloke with a shopping basket containing only a can of Special Brew, a copy of Club International and a tin of beans and sausages.
I live for those moments.
Peter
The supermarket after 1 a.m. is always an interesting place to be.
Paul
Sounds like a guy after my own heart. Although I haven't touched Special Brew since I puked out the window of a car over the trousers of a soldier who was checking ID's.
Isn't that an Edward Hopper painting: Supermarket, 3 a.m.: Special Brew, Sausage, Beans?
Peter
I was at Whitney over Christmas and I vouchsafe that that indeed was one of Hopper's late masterworks. Wonderful use of light on the Special Brew can.
I'm feeling kind of bad crowding in on the rare guy moment now,after seeing that Atlantic Monthly has a cover piece on why women aren't marrying, and I'm pretty sure that these moments are all you guys have left.
Another CVS moment: I was standing in the check out line idly looking at a pile of promo stuff and saw that one was a little rotisserie oven. Then I noticed that everything in the pile was $2.99. I asked the clerk to be sure, and she said yep, $2.99. So of course I bought it. To be fair, all I have is a microwave and a kind of hot plate arrangement otherwise so it wasn't totally ill-considered.
When I told a friend about this her eyes widened and she said, "Do not leave that thing unattended!"
I've done her one better. I've never taken it out of the box.
There was a CVS in Jamaica PLain (neighborhood of Boston) where the lines at the cashiers were always long, no matter the day or time of day. The cashiers were local kids, non-artist, non-gayhipster, types, who used their jobs as a platform for weird performance art. They spoke to one another, with an eye on the growing lines, to convey pertinent information about recent phone calls with friends or potential dates. No one ever seemed to complain, not when I was around for the 12 years I lived there, because we all were gay hipster wannabe types who'd descended into their awesome old world neighborhood and probably felt guilty about making it so hip and expensive. I'm not hip, but I was an enthusiast, which I think gets confusing for some.
One of my roommates worked as manager at a CVS, this time in downtown crossing, which is no neighborhood but is rife with people in a hurry. A Boston hurry, if you know what I mean. Roommate dropped out of Berklee Music and spent the nights playing with his band in the attic songs that ruined me of REM for a good long time. Until I saw REM unplugged and playing "Fall on Me". Then I got it.
SPACED!
greatest show ever~!
The sausage lends the painting the glamorous loneliness that Hopper portrayed so well.
Downtown Crossing really is no neighborhood, isn't it? It's a bridge between the Common and the financial district in one direction and between Government Center and the Combat Zone in the other.
Wait, scratch that bit about the Combat Zone.
Seana
Feel free to crowd. Guy moments dont have to be gender specific.
Sheiler
I know that CVS. And I know the Berklee School.
Here's an interesting fact you might not know. That's the neighbourhood where Van Morrison lived in 68 playing solo gigs coffee shops as he worked up the songs that would become Astral Weeks (his best album IMHO)
Andy
I'm with you brother.
Peter
Have you read Another Bullshit Night In Suck City?
Its a memoir about Boston in the 80s and its really terrific. One of the best books I read last year.
Adrian, I've heard the title, but I haven't read the book. If it's a memoir of Boston in the 1980s, I'd probably find it depressing because I'd have missed most of it even though I was there at the time.
======================
Detectives Beyond Borders
"Because Murder Is More Fun Away From Home"
http://www.detectivesbeyondborders.blogspot.com/
Peter
Its definitely stuff that you would want to miss.
But its a great book. I was lucky to read three terrific memoirs last year (and none this year):
Hitch 22, Another Bullshit Night In Suck City, Just Kids.
I see that Flynn, too, invents what could be a Hopper painting in the opening pages of his book.
Bahahahaha! I used to do that when I lived down that end....shit I still do that now I'm up in Grey...but yes, I would be 'oh no, fuck the 'list'...I'm a man and I know what I want...in and out....across Peanut Farm then home'
It all seemed great but I would end up circumnavigating the store so many times I felt like Magellan.....then get home thinking, 'fuck I forgot milk'.
My downfall would be and still is the blokey part looking at batteries or tools or computer cables, getting distracted by shiny things.
And yes I would invariably go to the area I knew best....the liquor dept....for a beer....cos it solves everything right?
Peter,
I used to think it was somehow wrong to buy fruit or vegetables at the many stands at the red line stop ... because it was the cross between shopping and finance. Have you been in Boston recently? That whole area - the old Opera House and so on, has been revitalized to the max. There's a new Ritz there. Combat Zone has been reduced to two or three shops/bars on one street.
Adrian,
Wow. I had *NO* idea Van Morrison lived in JP. I knew that others had, like Sylvia Plath. ee cummings is buried at Forest Hills cemetary, just down the street from the CVS. So is Eugene O'Neill.
My only brush with fame these days is that I'm living more permanently in the Laurentian mountains in the party house of Quebec's first comedian. He was known for his act of falling down the stairs, 'pretending' to be drunk.
But I like the idea of having neighbors giving me bags of limes from their trees. Australia is so looking good.
Oh, yeah, I knew the Combat Zone was long gone. And I once lived in an apartment that had an orange tree in its courtyard.
Dan
I couldn't cut across the Peanut Farm oval because there was a cricket match going on.
Actually they wouldnt have minded. It didnt look that serious. Unlike St Kilda City who would kick your arse.
Peter, Sheiler
I think both of you should give the Nick Flynn a go. I absolutely loved it. My wife who grew up in Newton couldnt get into it but I thought it was great.
I haven't read Bullshit Night either, but it was one that definitely made the rounds of the staff in its day. Certain types really loved it. Yeah, they were mainly all guys, as I recall.
I hate to say it but I didn't really get into Just Kids. I may finish it someday, but it seemed a little too self-absorbed. That is if you can be self-absorbed in yourself and one other person.
Seana
I know exactly what you're talking about, but still I loved it. Loved it. Especially for the voice and the milieu. I think the key to a good memoir is to have lived through an interesting time or to be able to tell your story in an original way. For me Smith succeeds on both fronts.
I think the milieu probably has more resonance for you than it does for me.
There's also the fact that this was the group--I can't call it a generation because they aren't that much older, but the people who were just that much ahead of us that they influenced my time, without my being old enough to be part of their time. It was the same thing when I went to college. The golden era had just passed. I don't mean thhat wasn't how I saw it, it was how the professors and everyone else saw it. They had just lived through a utopian experiment but that moment was over.
I think Patty Smith felt herself to be a bit outside her own era too, but that doesn't really help.
Seana
There are some fascinating insights from Vince Gilligan on this week's Breaking Bad Insider Podcast.
How is the pizza in your neck of the woods, Adrian?
Great. I'll check it out.
Oh Boy. Suck City looks really good. Newton, baa. I won't say anything more on *that* town.
But this reminiscing Boston-style reminds me of a pretty good story on the Moth podcast by a woman from Boston's Chinatown. Ellie Lee.
http://www.prx.org/pieces/46430-moth-radio-hour-202
Matt
My pizza was fantastic because I added extra jalapeno, garlic and ham. Also by the time it was ready I'd had a considerable amount of tequila.
Sheiler
Well Louis CK went to her high school so it cant be all bad.
Nobody will go the the grocery with me, because I turn into a competitive speed shopper. I plan everything out in my head during the ride to the store. No wasted motion, no wandering mind, most efficient route, I'm like a fascist.
Louis CK. You know I was going to say something else about Newtonians but, really, is it so bad to go to a good school system?
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