11 September Sunday

This week we experienced the last full moon of summer, the harvest moon. The gathering in. The reorganizing, the structuring, the hunkering down for fall leading us to winter. As I´ve said before, or at least intimated, the effects of this season change are not so dramatic in California, so lovers of it need to find more symbolic ways of observing it. Perhaps that is why Pumpkin Spice things are so incredibly popular here, as well as Halloween shops that open seasonally, usually on the 5th of July.

It is definitely fall. There is a moment every year- it must be the angle of the sun, or an earlier setting time, but we step outside, take a breath, and summer is over. Also, the temperature dropped twenty degrees, so I reopened the kitchen.

Since ancient times the market where food is stored and sold has been a crossroads for all of humanity great and small, strong and weak, getting by and barely holding on. It has been this way, I imagine, since cities began. This would have been a good thing to remind myself of when I alighted the 33 bus in San Francisco yesterday afternoon, right in front of Large Innercity Grocery Store, henceforth known as Lig´s. Every city in America has at least several Lig´s- a wearhouse hell-shit nightmare of sugary cereals and slaughtered animals where the universe´s lost and tortured souls wander aimlessly up and down aisles often with nothing in their hands. I imagine these folks are waiting for the dirigible that will dock soon in the bakery, welcome them aboard and take them to a distant galaxy where they will be restored, made whole. Each man, woman, and child seems to be seething with rage or in the throes of a manic episode. Couples openly feuding over how many ounces of mustard can be afforded. Women screaming at their brood of children to shut up, put that down, put that back. I saw a man openly cursing a Family Size pack of paper towels for not having anything in this MF Lig´s. Everywhere, plastic containers of aging potato salad, violently discarded lottery tickets, shattered jars of pickles. Near the coffee and tea, a very old man with bulging eyes standing perfectly still. It is not just a grocery, it is a tableau from Inferno. And I realize that when I am here, I am part of it. The others look at me and wonder what my deal is, and what am I looking at? They see me as an equal, which disgusts and offends me because I like to think I´m better than them. Yet, here we are in the same checkout line.

Yes, yes, I know, I went to save money. I went to get larger quantities of cleaning supplies. Yes, they claimed some food products at a savings. However, it appeared yesterday that the savings happened by Lig´s not stocking the products in the first place. Still, I did manage to find some good apples (literally) and potatoes. But, did I really save save SAVE anything? No, because I had to leave behind some of my illusions about the world being a beautiful and fair place. I never want to go there again, and I want to go right now.