Epistle. To: Wollstonecraft

How to know what to want, like happiness maybe, or even avoiding pain, is trouble enough. But when confronted by choices like eight different toasters or six different blenders it feels completely default-like to say oh they're all the same. Shouldn't you make a choice regardless? Was it good enough to toss out the extremes? Eliminate the cheapest model and the most expensive at the same time? And if doing so, then what was left? A bow to the way of the bargain hunting samurai taking up a solid intellectual position in the middle? But let's think about it - while half the world starves each night for lack of food or clean water or decent shelter there are eight different toaster variations to choose from. Just for burning bread muffins and bagels to be toped with something that melts and satisfies another whole list of cravings to have. Naturally any rationale can slip out of hand. Looking around just one store, in just one town, one could blow off a whole afternoon and become trapped by exploring the promises of all the gadgets in sight for sale. I needed a toaster. My old one from like fifteen years had shit the bed. But looking at all the toasters had a sudden and an almost violently pleasurable affect upon me. With all this in sight I scanned around and tried my best to stay defensive but truthfully when left to ponder on acres of merchandise and acres of mind I now wanted a toaster. I wanted wide settings. I wanted profanely cheap looking digital readouts. I said to the woman across the aisle -  who studied a large stainless dough mixing bowl with industrial paddles as though she were realizing she now needed to feed multitudes - can you believe this. Perhaps my scars made her uncomfortable. She said nothing in return and quietly made her way off past the vacuum food processing machines and chop-a-matic devices that accordingly turn any meal into a party. Were it not perverse I would say this was magic. I was landed somewhere I had not intended to be. And so feeling the drug-like benefits of shopping I moved laterally to the blenders. I didn't need a blender. Nor did I want one. But I was now certain something different would happen despite what I thought about it. Ah - twelve speeds - crush fruit ice alcohol - the smoothie of unrealized dreams - cocktails like dragonflies hovering in warm summer air - the deeper stuff requires some work even if money does make us strange - and the play on rule was here in effect so I had to continue this with dignity and purpose in a fucked-up world or else leave the store entirely. I've had plenty of toasters in my life and not many regrets about them. But never a blender. And that recognition struck me as odd. I asked the nurse how can I let this go? The nurse looked over the blenders, going over each one with a precision touch that was her fingertips at work in the world. Do you really want more junk in your life she asked? I knew she was right. But that wasn't the point. Look I said. When we were younger all this never crossed the radar. We used to run around like something wildness gave bones to. Clones of time really but believing we were mystics. And maybe we were. Out looking for experience. Longing for great unstated eagerness to haul us away. The nurse held up a blender. Yes I saw it. Like it was a trophy. Or some admittable evidence in court. And so you're trading this she asked? By now I was trying hard to really want a blender. I was trying to come away clean like the air does after a good rain. To do what you think. No I said. There's not much left to trade. Then buy a blender she said. But I didn't really believe it. That was just talk. And I told her so. So she asked? No I said it's like this -  I seem better when I remember. Sure the nurse said, putting one blender back and then picking  up another to inspect, it's all over too soon. Now I wanted everything. I wanted memories as crazy as the fake flowers bursting over in aisle 9. I wanted crappy home appliances that locked me up in retail chains of bliss and let me in on how to  make food like celebrity endorsements showed how. I wanted the sunlight falling outside across the parking lot like a huge dying star slicing suburban cars in two with shadows. I wanted to hear the nurse say again yes she would come by tomorrow while it was still a beautiful spring afternoon today and we were out driving and listening to play lists and throwing debit cards to the wind. Because the future was there - just this side of a lie and just on the other side of honesty -