The Careful Dissemination of Funds

I hear their idle chatter and wish that sound was optional. A box checked in a menu, a simple click and forget. The rapid dilation of my pupils brings me back. Back to hypnotic aisles of temptation and necessity. A selection of the finest they say. Right there see, on the cardboard, next to charts and columns of calories and strange numbers I’d sooner forget. But buy one get one free still gets me every time. I stare intently at the dancing numbers until the man with the tie moves away. Glossy pages shine brighter than the fruit racks they mirror, Competing for importance in my wallet and my life The magpie wins and the bananas will wait. Half the magazines hawk five a day in rounded sans serif, bold against the background of a chef’s haircut. Maxims of bizarre cosmopolitan playboys and hustlers marked up at 3.99. Landscapes of polished flesh glow beneath the loving airbrush of the paycheck. Competing for nuts at the zoo. A vanity fair for the hollow, shining in the fading light of a red top sunset. Paraphrased blogs and condensed morsels of crude celebrity nudes for the I-Generation and the remnants of New Labour and Thatcher’s Britain. Anglers, caravans and 50 cent, half the demographic, half the price. Count me out. I finger a few and find no real desire. The Internet offers this bilge up for free. They’d all be nude and crapping on each other. The great silicon toilet of humanity Past freezers of long dead prisoners, pulped to perfection. Pigs in tubes and flat cow concoctions. Pancakes of vomit and fish dishes I won’t ever try. No time for it. Frankenstein's monster behind glass slides. Packets of sugar in various disguises. Cereal and chocolate, soft drinks and sauce dips. Lattes and ladles, loofahs and loaves. The prattle returns through the shelving I turn around the curries and there is the tie. Talking sport and hard drinking, women and the weather. Looks me in the eye. I turn before any interaction and feign interest in something, a scouring pad. Intricately woven metal coils waste major concentration and he’s gone. Box checked, minimize and move on. Everything shines in this weird three-quarter light, hypnotic. Confusing. Conscious of the bottles ahead that I can’t ever touch. Seedy and appealing, puerile and appalling. Something for everyone. And nothing for me.