the secret life of groceries, 1

When I was a kid, one of my many great misconceptions about the world was that everyone at every business establishment my parents took me to was a total professional and knew everything there was to know about whatever business that person worked in.  This went from when my dad consulted with bankers or auto mechanics and stretched all the way into the sixteen-year-old who took my Happy Meal order.  I just thought employment was some sort of empowering experience.  And being allowed past the mysterious “Employee’s Only” barrier was a privilege earned by possessing fantastic skill and know-how.

I work at a healthy-ish-oriented grocery store, my first job after graduating college.  Everyone should work in a grocery store at some point, for a little while.  I’ve learned more about people in this job than I have at any previous job.  What people eat is a big deal.  I apply this to myself when I use the self check-out at H-E-B in hopes of concealing what food I eat from as many people as possible.  I get shy about buying macaroni and cheese.

My store functions on the idea that people will jump on any health trend known to the public. No matter how silly or restricting an idea is (people get amino acids as a substitute for meat substitutes, and I always thought amino acids were unavoidable as long as you ate some sort of organic material), we have a clientele for it.

The clientele, by the way, is mostly hippies, neo-hippies, and really old people.  A lot of really old people.  Something I’ve determined: that old person smell is more a result of not showering or cleaning clothing than it is part of simple aging.

I was told, when I applied, that something over sixty people work at the store, many of them in just one or two short shifts per week.  As anyone who has ever been employed anywhere has realized, every employee served some sort of intangible niche.  The anal-retentive and overly serious manager, the totally lazy stock boy, the air-headed bulk loader, the big and muscly meat market dude, the hyper cashier chick, the flamboyant gay guy, the old, the young, the queer, the bland.  Some places just strive for some sort of balanced personality encyclopedia on the payroll.

I didn’t know where I’d fit into that.  I was first put in the meat market.  I didn’t eat beef or pork, and I only now-and-then ate poultry and fish.  But within a month, I went vegetarian.

I was needed in the meat market because, a few months prior, an employee became seriously injured in the back room.  The back room includes sinks, a meat grinder (note: 80 percent lean ground beef has leftover chunks of old fat added to it to achieve its ratio), cutting table, and a bone saw.  When we wash it, we just spray everything down with a hose.  Water just collects.  Said employee slipped and grabbed a porcelain sink.  As I was told, geysers or black blood and serious nerve damage resulted.  And I was to be the added help to a short-staffed market.

Customers complain about the appearance of the meat.  I tell them it’s the blood, and I’m not lying.  People are picky about a slab of dead animal, and I figure that how much blood is where is kind of splitting hairs.  Some people have you go through a pile of shrimp to find the ones that are slightly more curled up.  Or they debate the comparative thickness of chops all cut on the same setting of the same saw.  But the blood, or rather the fact that it’s a dead animal’s blood, doesn’t bother them.  I get it on my arms, my pants, my shoes.  Even sometimes on my face, if something splashed just wrong.

We will not fail an audit because we forge the hell out of everything and the auditors hate venturing behind the counter as much as the next person.  Meat temperatures are rarely taken, the sanitizer water is never calibrated, shipments come that temperature “danger zone.”  It’s not fantastic at all, but, people have never complained of falling ill and, really, unless something’s broken, things are as they should be.  But it’s not like I’m thrilled to be a part of it.

Two of the butchers barely speak any English.  My relationship with them has always been really friendly.  Which, really, is the case for any relationship I’ve had with someone with whom I did not share a common spoken language.  It makes me wonder if we should just all speak a different language, because the little bit that everyone learns of other languages is pleasantries, like how to politely say hello or good bye or bless someone when they sneeze.  And it’s always, “how are you?”  Reply: “I’m well, thank you.”

So it’s fun to hang around long enough to learn that behind the polite Chapter 1 phrase book sayings are sex-crazed alcoholics.  Who teased me about how many bananas I eat by enacting anal sex with one another in full view of the whole store.

Then there’s the food itself.  Just.  Check expiration dates, always, and don’t fuck with the people handling your food.

Hopefully, anyone for whom chicken is a staple won’t experience how a batch of frozen chicken tenders comes to us.  In a cardboard box, wrapped in plastic, frozen together in a rectangle that weighs something like twenty or thirty pounds, depending on the packing.  This is what I imagine human meat looks like frozen: this sort of pale white and dirty yellow, oozing pink juice.  Chicken juice, by the way, is the one of the most slippery and skin-irritating substances I’ve come across.  Anyway, since people buy slashes of chicken breast by the armloads, the store rarely gets to thaw out the shipments of tenders fast enough, which prompts the use of a large metal pick and the venting of frustration about, I don’t know, some girl you dated in high school who fucked you over, whatever it takes to plow into that citadel of chicken muscle and pry apart the strips of gooey, rubbery flesh.

If something falls on the floor, it does not get washed.  We can’t use any kind of agent that might clean things, because it’ll fuck up the taste of the meat more than the grunge on the floor would fuck it up.  This is the same policy practiced by every person who has ever served you french fries.  And the floor is so bloodied and greased and grimed that many employees have stipulated in writing that they will not set foot upon it.

Do you remember the episode of the The Simpsons where Homer gets obsessed with grease collection?  It’s all true.  A huge tub of chicken grease from the rotisserie oven is kept, and when it gets enough gallons of goo in it, the tub gets dumped into a giant metal bin out back.  Recently, the bin overflowed when one of the meat market workers tried to dump the chicken grease.

And there’s more.  Drugs and lawsuits and harassments and people trapped in trash compressors.  But that’s for later.

consumerism

Why are all CVS drugstores carpeted? I find it terribly irking. Every time I walk into a CVS, I want to walk right back out. I don't go to CVS that often--I usually go to Walgreens--but when I do, the first thought that always crosses my mind is, "Oh yeah, these places are carpeted," and I think about how weird that makes the merchandise look, how un-shiny and un-consumery and un-wantable. It's like someone bought a bunch of metal shelves and set them up in their living room and hooked up a few fluorescent lighs. They recently opened up a CVS right by school, on State and Congress, which is too convenient, and they've got four security guards in there at any given time making sure all the backpacked eighteen-year-olds aren't pocketing condoms and gum. I walked in for a snack after my night class a few days ago and settled on chocolate covered pretzels. They didn't taste as good as I wanted them to, and I blame it on the carpet. Can you imagine how disgusting that carpet gets, especially in the winter? I don't get it. Is it to keep people from slipping and falling and suing? 

perpetual virgin syndrome

I have a friend who has been with her boyfriend for about two years. The relationship is kind of a big deal in that she liked him an awful lot for quite a while before they were together. Their union was delayed by shyness, maybe some social awkwardness, anxiety, I don’t know, some sort of cocktail of those ingredients.

But they had a big romance-movie moment one night on a porch when, while soft music played, the two found themselves slow dancing with quiet giddiness, and he said something like, “I’ve liked you for a really long time.” And she gushed and said the same thing back to him, and, though not currently a fan of the idea of raising a child, she eventually developed a desire even potentially to have his baby. So it’s serious love.

But, like so many stories of relationship problems go, sex is an issue. Or, rather, how sex is thought of and initiated. He seems to avoid the topic in conversation and his modus operandi for getting things going is to retardedly grab one of her boobs and make a sort of boyish “huh-huh” laugh. Apparently, as if a freshly pubescent boy were saying, “huh-huh, boobs, huh-huh.” Like Butthead.

Like a virgin.

And I realized this is a perfect example of Perpetual Virgin Syndrome. It’s true he had limited sex experience before this relationship, and it’s true he has confidence issues that could explain some instances of shying away from sex. But that doesn’t keep everyone from acting so virginy.

There are scores symptoms, many of which seem like those tip-of-the-tongue descriptions you try to share in discourse where the person you’re talking to gets it and says, “yes, exactly!” Not knowing how to go about having sex, never-ending callow awe with genitalia, watching porn like there’s going to be a Q and A after, acting as though the opposite sex is altogether some unapproachable Pandora’s Box, asking a few too many “is it true that...” questions, not giving a very learned response to all those stupid sex-themed jokes that get tossed around, coming off as too much of a nice guy, possessing more memories of video games than of sex, talking about love like your only basis for philosophy is a Whitney Houston lyric, being generally emo, and acting, you know, just... like a virgin, in general. Like sex has that pre-sexual-experience mystique.

I’ll admit that I was one of the most virgny virgins when I was one. I did play a lot of video games, I did dissect diagrams and videos, and I did give off an almost pathetic hopeless-romantic vibe. It was so obvious that once in a writing class in school, I’d done a piece that was part of a larger story where a sheltered teenage kid falls in love with sort of a “bad girl” at first sight, and one of the pieces of feedback I got was “don’t take this the wrong way, but you have got to get laid.”

To still be so inexperienced even with experience just seems odd, like someone is constantly stuck in so many coming-of-age movies from the 1980s. My friend admits that it’s frustrating, incredibly frustrating, even. Dennis Miller, not that I like the motherfucker, once commented on all the virgins promised to those Islamic terrorists when they die. He said, “after a few, wouldn’t you want a pro?”

It’s not just guys, for sure, although we’re all conditioned to expect certain manly sexual attributes from guys, but girls get it, too. My ex told me about the sex ed she got in junior high. Her teacher did some metaphor job with the female body and said girls have a limited number of petals on their flower, and if you give those petals away before you find the right guy, you won’t have any left.

The sex ed I got, by the way, was an abstinence-only program called Project Self-Respect. The guy who taught it made me think of the phrase “castrated reformed sex offender.” He had a perverted smile but wouldn’t look at or go near any of the girls. The culture I was surrounded in was a major launching point for perpetual virgin syndrome. “This is your penis, don’t feel bad at all about the nature of your penis.” What were we supposed to do? Say, “woooow, I have a penis, and it deserves respect”?

Some fuzzy science about STDs was used. Okay, actually, some flat-out fucking lies about STDs were used. Like how AIDS could be transmitted almost telepathically. And lots of “hey, it could happen” scenarios that physical science demands I not consider seriously. We were supposed to fear sex, I gathered. Which, if population control were the intention, I might forgive in the slightest way, but, trying to turn a bunch of teenagers into perpetual virgins for the sake of, what, making sex a religious experience?, kind of irks me.

And it irks my friend, who has a repressed sexual appetite due to her PVS boyfriend. His sex ed, amazingly, was incredibly liberal and "sex is natural and homosexual couples have sex, also, and this is how sex happens." I don't know, maybe I’d be more entertained by the sex ed offered in Mean Girls, where the P.E. coach says, “if you have sex... you will get AIDS... and you will die.” Even with that education, guys might stare at girls like horny, repressed, confused scientists. Who write adolescent poetry. And long to squeeze boobs.

alarm clock

I need to buy a new alarm clock

and I've been meaning to do this for weeks.

I wake myself up with the alarm on my cell phone,

and even if I put it in the other room before I go to sleep,

I just carry it back to bed with me after I've turned it off

and sleep two hours later than I wanted to.

Today's my day off and I didn't set an alarm.

I slept until 2:30. It was raining and dark outside

when I finally got up, though, and I know that's why.

I can't ever wake up when it rains.

preface

I guess I should preface anything else I ever say by attempting to explain the major concrete philosophy I have about people, about life, about all that shit.

We are our brains.

This isn’t an earth-shattering concept, nor is it part of a great epiphany that makes me feel superior to anyone else who has ever thought of anything. I’m not trying to be deep, and I usually hate deep, philosophical, open-ended question discussions. So when I say that we are our brains, I mean it as something I accept to be, until great evidence contradicts, a simple fact.

Simple, maybe, because it’s four monosyllabic words and sounds fairly obvious, but I hope I’m not hiding behind just how complex human brains really are. An incredible amount of activity happens that shriveled cantaloupe. It houses an estimated 100 billion neurons, and yet four-fifths of it is water. It’s responsible for every rocket science problem solved and every toe stubbed. And many of its ins, outs, purposes still go unknown.

Basically, there is an incredibly long formula for who we are, part of which is filled in from conception, another part filled in gradually by every moment of existence thereafter. All of which is open to interpretation by, yep, the brain.

Thanks to a study done by researchers at UNC Chapel Hill, I may have a little something extra to explain and elaborate my point. The study followed 1,100 males in middle school and high school, aged 12-18. What researchers were looking for was an indicator, possibly genetic, of violent or “delinquent” behavior. Over a six-year span, subjects filled out surveys, highlights in life and behavior were noted, and, in the end, the study concluded that evidence supported the existence of a genetic link to aggressive behavior.

Essentially, our inclination to a certain behavior is wired into DNA.

Still, the study noted that genes apparently need to be activated by an outside factor. Someone with the potential to be a tyrannical asshole still needs the correct catalyst. Every human being carries an impossibly long “if ___, then ___” list, and the brain is only thing capable of consulting that list. Constantly.

Then there are those scores of studies implying, if not empirically proving, that spirituality is linked to activity in a specific spot in the brain. Either you’ve got spirituality potential in your head or you don’t. So far, I’m certain I don’t. A million gods could be looking down at me while I pick my nose, but my brain has so far lacked the equipment to make me think so.

But brains don’t just dictate the highlights of someone’s ethos. Hell, there’s even evidence to suggest that there’s a part of the brain just for remembering celebrities’ faces. Think about that next time you see an ad on a web site asking you to determine which actress’ lips are shown in a photo. But I don’t recommend you click on an answer.

I can’t leave out the rest of the body, but the body feeds the brain information. The brain decides which information is relevant. Chemical balance affects brain interpretation (hence my fascination with drugs). A whole chunk of the brain doesn’t even think; it just does and controls.

So who we are, what we do, is written in and decided by a soggy mass in our head.

I had almost a dozen teachers in my life pass out the infamous “Attitude” bit by Charles Swindoll on the first day of class. You’ve probably read it at some point. Maybe even half a dozen times. The second half of it is what has pissed me off from the first time it landed on a school desk in front of me.

"The remarkable thing is we have a choice every day regarding the attitude we will embrace for that day. We cannot change our past... we cannot change the fact that people will act in a certain way. We cannot change the inevitable. The only thing we can do is play on the one string we have, and that is our attitude... I am convinced that life is 10% what happens to me and 90% how I react to it.
And so it is with you... we are in charge of our attitudes."

My assumption whenever I received this mantra was usually something along the lines of, this teacher is going to knowingly do something I dislike and blame me if I get upset about it. I knew then that not everybody has control over their emotions, and that, most commonly, people have very limited control of how they feel. It’s entirely possible that a portion of every class that was handed a stack of Swindoll’s philosophy would have a positive reaction to the paper, but I never once thought it was worth all the trees sacrificed for the cause of a harmonious classroom.

And, hey, isn’t a reaction an act, as well? And why are we supposed to change how we act even though other people will act a “certain” way? And how does Swindoll expect me to change if he just admitted that we can’t change how people will act?

The essay would also always make me think of starving, homeless people in third-world countries featured prominently in National Geographic. I thought about how in charge they’re supposed to be of their attitudes. It just seemed, to me, that so many people have too many negative factors and catalysts for their brains to be especially positive.

Hope, I think, lies not in positively changing everything, but rather in changing something. Demanding that everything changes and blaming everyone else when it doesn’t always seemed overly aggressive and unsympathetic, to me. And so, I never felt inspired to keep Swindoll’s pesky charge around whenever someone issued me a copy.

I don’t think reducing the ethos almost seven billion people to a piece of tissue is really so depressing. I still don’t know what will happen on any given day, or who I will meet, or how someone will reveal themselves, or even what I will ultimately be capable of.

And, in the end, all I’ve got is my brain, this companion confined to my skull.