Trademarked by the alcoholic is a general feeling, a consensus voiced both in her head and without, that she has arrived behind. Behind schedule, beneath the wheel, and unfairly dismissed. She’s Cassandra riding the White Rabbit.
No one listens when you’re late, late, late.
Especially true of your conclusions and ideas. You were born thinking unorthodox, creative thoughts that can change hearts and minds and buck whole systems, if your fliers can reach the post in time. But they never do, do they? You have to staple your yesterday’s news to poles and event boards like every other clown. Only to be stapled over tomorrow, because second-place ideas don’t last and you’re what you’ve always feared: a knockoff joke. Bing to Google. The Monkees to The Beatles.
It’s shopping carts for me. Shopping carts in human spaces. Construction sites, bus stops, trails, cemeteries. Humanized by human environs. They featured prominently in my short stories, plays, screenplays, Instagrams, thoughts and prayers. It was my thing, I came up with it. I just never shared it. I wanted to become a big deal first, or a different person, at least.
An outsize estimation of your potential is another alcoholic feature.
Then I noticed cinematographers notice shopping carts. While I was out drinking they rolled them into their mise en scène. Uphill, downhill, foreground, background. Everywhere. White Noise was the dagger. The 2022. Adam Driver, André 3000. Noah Baumbach and Lol Crawley drove shopping carts all over my dreams. I forget if the cart was even in Don DeLillo’s novel. Had to be, sure, there’s the famous supermarket passage, but featured like this, like a fucking chorus line?
My vision was to park my shopping cart in the national spotlight and then…I don’t know. It was a drunk’s idea. All act one and three, no middle. A cart full of shit. Would have done my favorite appurtenance of modern hunter-gathering a grave disservice.
You’ll hear about shopping carts in AA meetings, when old-timers share about the Twelfth Step.
Even on days when I don’t feel like I can be of service, I just slow down and do the little things. Help old ladies cross the street, bring shopping carts back to the front of the store.
See that! Right at the end.
It’s carts in the Twelfth and clipping toenails in the Tenth and Fourth. Titters of laughter every time, but disingenuous laughter. You feel a little embarrassed for all these parrots and imitators. But someone got the good laughs once. Someone told it first.
I won’t be truly happy until I accept ideas are never truly mine, or anyone’s. Collective unconscious sort of thing. No one owns creations because all of creation is one.
Whose idea was that?
todd of tacoma 