Finger Exercise #2 - "Key Foods"

 

By the time I had arrived, the scene had progressed from mild frustration, to regular frustration. The aisles in NY grocery stores only yield so many passing lanes and due to the produce man’s cart of assorted lettuces, the way had become blocked and the only hope of going towards the refrigerated dairy was a large circumnavigation of the onion display. The time for which, none of us had. With the AC on blast, I get in line behind two people. One, an overweight near sighted mother of two horrible children, and a young bespectacled hipster art student.

The mother gets up each morning when her horrible children ask for their horrible sugary cereals. She has a 45 minute commute to her job, consisting of two trains and several stairs, which are becoming harder each day. She has a cup of Folgers in the morning, an iced Dunkin Donuts black with 4 sugars during the commute, a 5 Hour Energy at 2:30, and sometimes a diet Coca-Cola with dinner. Throughout the day there is a static tiredness, an all encompassing and omnipresent weariness. She thinks of herself as a dog person because she wears “sporty” outfits, but the frizziness of her hair, the pedestrian wear in her sneakers and sweat pants, and the far off look in her eye leads me to believe she is a cat lady with no cats. In school she was proud to be an efficient reader, but her interest in fine literature was dispelled because appearing too interested in class was grounds for humiliation at the hands of her young and stupid friends at Richmondtown Prep on Staten Island. She has passed on her passable study habits to her children who are draped at either side of the cart, wearing lobotomized stares in front of the salad dressing, a deep stupidity in their eyes, apathetic and slow as molasses.

The art student wakes up around the 10:30 - 2:30 window and has borrowed this strategy from cable repair men. Most things happening in his life in large bay windows of time. To get to his catering job he would prefer to ride his bike, but having only one gear can be a strain on his little chicken stick legs, so he prefers to take the N to 42nd and transfer to the 1 train to 18th St. He’s been trying to watch his caffeine intake, but if the night before was especially raucous he has little choice but to keep a steady waterfall of coffee, bought at a myriad of establishments, rushing into his mustachioed face. Unlike his grad student friends, he will drink Starbucks and has on occasion enjoyed an iced grande carmael macchiato, because the caramel sauce settles in the bottom corners of his cup and turns into a soft, taffy like sugar snack that jazzes his mouth. He is a cat person, but does not know it yet. His schooling has been top notch and his family came from wealth, so they created a padded playroom for his life. He was always encouraged to work on big problems and not worry about keeping up with standards, as things could be moved to accommodate him, and not the other way around. He learned creativity not from scarcity or resourcefulness, but by the endless streams of support and encouragement from private schools and the terrarium of privilege which now he feels is his job to thwart and refute, rebuke and rebel. He is wearing a stupid hat.