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the supermarket murders, or, muffins

i am being pummeled by the soft garbage-bag fists of muzak in the produce aisle, seeing my blurred reflection in a waxed apple, completely forgetting what i came to shop for, staring at the other shoppers and the grim way they go about selecting their goods. i must be looking for pomegranates and artichokes, since those items are all i ever eat, other than the occasional strawberries and whipped cream with spaghetti, which i eat off the lid of the toilet while sitting in the bathtub. these people look like they sat up in caskets this morning, suddenly confronted by a sincere need for asparagus or squash, neither of which they have the stomach for. i need something for dinner tonight, but it's hard to concentrate on shopping in a morgue. shopping is the way americans respond to every threat, and you can see it in their faces; this is war. but anything to do with eating should be a lusty celebration, not a chore. there ought to be nudes with cherubic bodies atop every pile of fruits & vegetables, celebrating the colors & tastes & sleeping smells by eating grapes out of each other's orifices and fencing with plump zucchinis, playing baseball with cucumbers & oranges, slipping on the results & laughing gladly, but instead every time i enter this market i am confronted by these fucking bottled-water-brained zombies.

i can't resist any more--with an easy speed & nonchalance that startles even myself, i pick up a very heavy head of iceberg lettuce, which i love, and hurl it at what i think is a sturdy middle-aged man and turns out to be a frail elderly woman. the lettuce bounces off the side of her already shaky head and lands perfectly in her carriage. i cringe, but she seems to be alright, still standing though a bit dazed. i decide to forget about targets, since the grimness of modern life has never presented me with a clear target, not in the headlines, not on the television, and not on the vapid newsstands that leer at me with unwitting prophecies of total cultural burnout whenever i walk toward the check-out. i pick up a hearty-looking artichoke and hurl it indiscriminately, not watching to see where it lands, and i hear a strange muffled scream, which makes me giggle uncontrollably. i begin to pick up lovely green peppers and bunches of grapes, hurling them in huge ecstatic arcs because the ceiling is very high and looks like some kind of upside-down martian graveyard, and all this space was obviously made for a display such as this. so much potential, so much unused potential in every moment! i begin to look up every now & then to see the smashed fruits (and vegetables, heehee) of my glad labor. every one of these shoppers should thank me, i serenely reflect as a cumquat knocks the sunglasses off the face of a skinny man who is probably 35 but whose eye sockets look more like 70, who will now have something new to talk about when he goes home to his wife today. my tosses are becoming simultaneously more vigorous and more elegant, and almost everyone who isn't being blinded by this barrage of summer squash & radishes is gawking at me, probably more astonished than i am that security hasn't arrived yet. are they frozen in front of the video monitors, not sure whether to laugh or scream? i'm sure they never expected to see such a magnificent display, and that's the beauty and the invincibility of the totally unexpected. the store manager now comes at me like a transsexual linebacker, and i expertly dispatch him with a 90-mile-an-hour lemon to the forehead. i think he's pretending to be unconscious so as to avoid dealing with this overstimulating situation, and i don't blame him, as i will probably use a similar tactic when the security guards arrive, hopefully without guns.

i see a telephone, also not being used to it's full potential, grab it with my trembling hands and begin to bark into it with an intensely high pitch, causing a brave lad in a jogging jumpsuit to cover his ears as he advances toward me. he screams something about his grandmother's heart, using very little vocabulary. i laugh hysterically, which proves to be very amusing (which makes me laugh even harder) since i am still holding the receiver to my lips and the cardboard catacombs of the supermarket vibrate with my intercom-enhanced laughter. i wish my laugh was always this loud. now security is surrounding me, and i surprise myself with my resourcefulness by taking out their leader, who has the most spectacular comb-over i have ever seen, with a ten-pound bag of potatoes to his ribcage. he should have admitted his encroaching baldness; perhaps then i would have spared him. as i turn to flee i see the credit-card zombies glaring at me, covered with stains of incredible variety, not sure what to do when their assassin ignores the fearsomeness of modern weaponry and instead attacks them with produce.

i run until i reach the an empty part of the store, and then i see them. the most extravagantly-sized blueberry muffins i've ever seen. they are perfect, and the granules of sugar that adorn their tops are the size of cars(the tops are the best part of every muffin--unlike a human, muffins get less stimulating as you go down, heehee). i must have these muffins. i check to make sure that i have indeed momentarily evaded my baffled pursuers, then i grab an armload of about twenty of these distinguished muffins. i even like the word "muffin." i carry my bundle proudly to the check-out, losing several muffins on the way and attracting looks from anybody in the market who wasn't already staring. i tumble them down on the check-out counter with a seductive grin at the cashier, who is cute but is wearing too much make-up. i tell her as i unload my muffins that if she decides to drop out of mime school she is welcome to travel with me across the country. she doesn't look very sure of herself, so i don't wait for an answer to my invitation. i actually manage to pay for my muffins and begin toward the exits before i feel hands of fake steel on my arms. i tell these furious men that i am not their enemy. i tell them that i like baseball, and willie nelson, and blondes, and i am sincere, but they continue to wail at me, barely coherently, about the extent of the sodomy that will be visited upon me when the police arrive. i ask them if one of them will bring me my muffins while i sit in the office, since i did pay for them, and when they refuse, i ask them to compromise and bring me just the tops, saving the bottoms for themselves, but they seem to know that this is a rotten deal because they refuse me again. i look across the office and see myself reflected in a blue computer screen, surrounded by their green overcoats with a sexy trickle of blood running from the corner of my mouth, and realize that these men are not even security guards, that i have been subdued by the deli department. i tell them that i once worked in a deli department, and they demand my silence, then joke amongst themselves about what a lousy deli worker i must have been, as they apparently think that this is something to be ashamed of. i am not as alien as they think, i assure them. i like johnny cash, confetti, cornflakes, and fireworks and rollercoasters. one of them asks me who johnny cash is, and i exclaim that if he doesn't know that, that i am actually a better american than he is. then i try to escape, and fail, lurching against arms that are weaker than my own, but too numerous. suddenly i'm very tired.


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