Oscar Wilde’s famous quote about how ‘life imitates art’ may sound ironic, even flippant, but it’s really just a simple down-to-earth truth. We sense the spirit of things before we see them. Or when we see them, the spirit predominates. That’s why the cold light of excessive florescence illuminates only part of what’s happening in the Walgreens at Mission and Cesar Chavez Streets. I am trying to buy some fearful things…that is it to say, small objects driven of excessive fear…when there is a small snag at the checkout.
The Filipina clerk…and they are all Filipina…is having a spirited exchange with a colleague. This has been occurring in Tagalog, but with my approach the scene shifts to English. They are talking about a customer, a woman who has just exited. And it develops that this woman is not a shoplifter, as I might expect, but a much more conventional thief. She grabs and runs, as the shop assistant explains. First she poses some difficult retail question. Then, having seduced her mercantile victim into sincere quandary, she makes her hit. Not too successfully, it seems. These women are on to her.
As for me, I am purchasing nasal decongestants and a Walgreens generic sleeping potion. Thinking I might want to have a companion of differing chemistry, just for a bit of physiological variety, the products reveal themselves to be identical. All generic sleeping pills seem to have the same stuff. Not only that, exactly the same amount. There must be 20 varieties and brands of the same thing. Not the same price, of course. Isn’t capitalism great?
Adding to this lack of retail variety is Walgreens itself. The drug store chain appears to have 10 locations within a single mile of Mission Street. This particular outpost is not just a new retail interior of a vintage San Francisco building, but a wholly modern edifice, complete with its own parking structure. Very suburban, in fact.
Meanwhile, this talk of the grabber leaves a slightly chilling resonance. Because these days no event just happens. All are portents. Imitating art, that is. And this rough woman from the streets who enters the glass and stainless steel modernity of this particular Walgreens…well, she is straight out of Tolstoy. Hardly an original observation. There’s always a serf around when Tolstoy’s plots take a turning. Russia is about to take a turning, of course. It’s headed straight for Sovietization, 60 million war dead, Kruschev, perestroika and Donald Trump. But never mind.
Mind the fear, my own. I keep imagining myself ‘trapped’ in a cabin bed at the Minnesota conference I am attending next week. Pinned by age and paralysis. The idea is that a sleeping pill might help. And rather than wake up stuffy and panicky, some nasal unblocking might be in order. Hard to say. Easier to say is that there are much bigger things to worry about than getting out of bed. Such as why even make the effort. The answer being obvious enough. We make the effort. We make the world. We make it what it is. And the social fabric of Mission Street is a bad, dysfunctional interweaving of natural, not fully combed Mexican wool…and some cheap synthetic. It isn’t working.