White Noise in the Kitchen Supplies Aisle

Maybe when we die, the first thing we’ll say is, ‘I know this feeling. I was here before’.

– White Noise, Don De Lillo

An incident occurred in a grocery store aisle last Sunday afternoon that brought to mind Don De Lillo’s 1985 postmodern novel, White Noise.

That’s how my brain is wired: everything gets filtered through a literary perspective. The ongoing contamination of beef in the US meat packing industry that was recently uncovered in the New York Times, for example, brings to my mind a discussion of Upton Sinclair’s 1906 novel, The Jungle, which exposed those same filthy conditions in Chicago’s stockyards and led to the creation of safety standards that we are, apparently, not adhering to 103 years later. If you tell me that you got a GPS microchip locator implant for your pooch, I’m going to sit you down for a short lecture on dystopian novels like Huxley’s Brave New World and Orwell’s 1984. Taking a trip to beautiful coastal Monterey, California? Well, have a seat, and let me tell you all about John Steinbeck. If you already know about Steinbeck then let’s talk about all the great Steinbeck-related spots you can visit on your retreat to make it a literary delight.

I would bore my friends to death if I had any.

So I’m at the Albertson’s grocery store on Flamingo Road and Haualapia (Who-All-Uh-Pie) Road in Las Vegas. I’ve gone down the entire list the wife gave me when I left the house. Everything is in the cart: dinner for two nights, salad, milk, garbage bags, that El Salvadoran beer I like, a bag of Starbucks Caffe Verona coffee beans, green onions, a couple of votive candles, and…shit, I didn’t get the dishwasher detergent. I steer the cart down the kitchen supplies aisle: Playtex rubber gloves, 409 cleaning spray, Oh-Boy kitchen sponges, Windex, Windex Crystal Rain, Windex Multi-Surface Vinegar, Windex Multi-Surface Grease Cutter, Windex Outdoor Multi-Surface Cleaner.

Finally, the dishwasher detergent section; to the left of me, in the liquid dishwashing soap section (I’m buying those hardened rabbit pellet things you drop into the soap drawer), two women, obviously acquainted with each other, are engrossed in conversation. There is nothing memorable to pass on about their physical appearance because I was too engaged search for the cheapest generic Cascade knock-off I could spot on the shelf to pay them so much as a glance.

“–so, once again, I was washing my dishes at my usual time, five o’clock,” one of the women says, “and the sensation overwhelms me once more: I want to bake an apple pie like nobody’s business, a fresh, hot apple pie with vanilla ice cream melting all over it. I can literally smell it.”

Sounds like an olfactory hallucination, I’m thinking.

“Five nights in a row!” she continues. “Straight up, five o’clock, when I go to wash the dishes, I’m struck with an overwhelming desire to bake an apple pie. And then I finally figured out what it was.”

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw her sweep a 13-ounce bottle of dishwashing detergent off the shelf.

“This stuff!” she proclaimed. “Jergen’s Fresh Green Apple. It is so aromatic, you wouldn’t believe it. I mean, it tricked my senses into thinking I wanted apple pie.”

I dropped the bag of Cascade into the cart and continued up the aisle, wondering if I had just been duped into watching a commercial product pitch disguised as live theater. You never know in this postmodern world.