Ataraxia
Maybe better days are right around the corner, it’s just that you can’t see them yet.
There’s a girl in an oversized dark green sweatshirt, sleeves covering half her hands, trying to bend the laws of physics in the meat department. She’s right where the poultry intersects with the pork, caught in the corner of the little L, surrounded by customers. Her attempt to shrink herself and her cart to be as unobtrusive as possible is foiled by a trolly piled high with re-stock inventory that she accidentally backs into.
She’s making room so I can get in between her and the person on my right, and jostles her cart in frustration, shimmying it back to front to try to get it lined up next to the shelf.
“I feel like I’m always in the way,” she says, to me or to no-one in particular.
“I feel like I’ve been in the way since I was born,” I quip, briefly making eye contact and giving her a smile that says both that I get it and that I’m only half-joking. She looks like vaguely like Ella Purnell, if Ella Purnell had normal, human-sized eyes instead of those big anime orbs that make her look like a living cartoon.
“Tell me about it,” she says. “I hate shopping in crowds.”
“Me too,” I say, reaching for the pork chorizo to see if it’s the organic kind the customer ordered. “And the worst thing is, I do this for work. So I do it all day, every day.”
“Oh, do you do Instacart?” She asks. “My mom does that. But she’s 66, and she gets these orders where she has to carry cases of water up all these stairs...”
“I don’t take orders with cases of water,” I say. “I’ve made that mistake too many times. Last summer, there was a guy who ordered five cases to a third floor apartment with no elevator.”
The chorizo is not organic. I’m going to have to tell the customer they’re out.
“My mom had to take them up to a FIFTH floor apartment with no elevator,” she says, her voice incredulous. “And she’s 66. And she’s had knee replacement surgery.”
We bitch a little more about Instacart. She doesn’t repeat her mother’s age a third time. The Sunday crowd mills around us like zombies with shopping lists.
“I’m glad we had this moment,” I say, as though we’ve resolved something existential, and I point my cart in the direction of the hamburger patties. Before the words are fully out of my mouth, I’m already in motion.
“Yeah. Me too,” she says in a doppler fade, and I’m onto the next item on my list. A moment later, a voice behind me asks, exasperation exaggerated for effect, “Why are you always in the WAY?”
“I’m Sorry!” I say, making it sound like I’m on the verge of tears.
She zooms by. I keep working.
We don’t bump into each other again.
I deliver $217 worth of wine and cocktail mixers to a white house with a bright red front door. There’s a “No Kings” flag hanging out front. It makes me wonder if the person who answers will have green hair. But the woman at the door is blonde, in her early 40s, and she’s carrying a little dog in her left hand that looks like a big, angry rodent. She hands me her driver’s license for the mandatory ID check before I even ask.
As I scan the barcode with my phone, we make small talk, and I pretend not to notice that she’s obviously been crying. Her nose is red, her eyes are puffy, and her voice carries the pinched sound of acute, recent nasal congestion. As a show of gratitude for the courtesy, she pretends not to notice me pretending. We’re engaged in the ancient ritual of avoiding awkwardness by unstated mutual consent. I offer to bring the overflowing box of wine in for her, but she assures me she’s got it, so I’m on my way.
A large delivery takes me to a very nice house with four vehicles parked in front: a Mercedes G Wagon, A Lincoln Navigator, a Land Rover Defender, and a Rolls-Royce. They all look new, and taken together are worth over $800,000 — more than I’ll probably make in the next decade, maybe even two, unless I find some way to build a business that pays a living wage again. Envy isn’t my thing at all. I never begrudge people what they’ve earned. But sometimes I do marvel at the successes I see people pull off while I’ve managed, smart guy that I believe myself to be, to wind up stuck trading whole days for just a few dollars. And doing so at an age where I should be enjoying the fruits of the past two decades of labor.
But there’s no point crying about it. Just have to keep on keepin’ on. Maybe better days are right around the corner, it’s just that I can’t see them yet.
A man in the produce aisle is wearing a shirt depicting the iconic covered wagon from The Oregon Trail. Beneath the image, a caption says, “Please be patient with me, I’m from the 90s.”
Have we grown so old?
I look at the guy and say, “At least you didn’t die of dysentery.”
He’s confused for a minute, until I thrust my chin towards his shirt. He looks down and laughs.
“That’s right!” he calls back, recognition dawning a few seconds late.
The items in my orders sometimes form patterns.
Patterns tell stories.
Stories, properly entered into, build rapport.
Rapport increases tips.
It also makes me feel like a human being for a fleeting moment.
“Tempranillo, paella rice, saffron…I’m sensing a delicious theme!” I text the customer through the app.
“We are team Spain tomorrow!” she texts back.
Later, when I drop her order off, we talk on her bright yellow porch under fading twilight about the World Cup. It’s a conversation that lasts only a minute or two, but if the exchange is insubstantial, it’s warm and it’s human and we both manage to laugh at least once without faking it, so I chalk it up as a win. Another 1% added back to my ever-depleting social battery.
On a weekday morning, I wake up to find that my water is off, with no advance notice from the property manager. I’m not always hungry in the morning, but for some reason on this morning I’m starving, and with no water for cooking or cleaning, I decide to go out to breakfast at the place up the street. I’ve got an inexplicable craving for corned beef hash, so I order it with two eggs over easy, home fries, and a side of spiced apples. I didn’t sleep particularly well the previous night, so I’m grateful when the coffee comes, and keeps coming. I stack up little creamer thimble husks on a saucer until I get the contents of each cup to the right shade of brown.
An older couple who look every bit the part of doting grandparents sit down at a booth adjacent to my table, a rambunctious young boy in tow. The woman attends to the kid’s squirming, but the man has a placeholder expression on his face that says he’s miles away. He’s a compact man, well below average height, but he has a presence that’s hard to miss. He slowly scans the room like maybe he’ll see the answer to a question only he knows written somewhere on the walls, wearing a pursed-lip smile that doesn’t touch his eyes. His hair is perfect, trimmed neatly, with a curvature that reminds me of the Lego hair you can snap on and off the little figurines. It’s auburn almost everywhere, fading to silver at the temples. He wears a pristine cobalt blue quarter-zip fleece, the collar popping ever so slightly, not a fleck of lint visible on the finely-woven fabric. He has the quiet but confident aura of a CPA or CFO or some other high-competence job in the world of finance. A man who knows how to manage money, and in so doing, earned plenty of his own.
He looks calm, but not at peace.
A waitress saunters by in a red t-shirt, about 5-foot-2 and nearly as wide. She has a face like a battering ram, and I get the impression that she could be a formidable rugby player if the waitress gig doesn’t work out. The whole place is too dark, and though the food is good, the feeling is wrong, somehow. It’s full of people but feels dead in a way I can’t put my finger on. I finish my meal, overpay for what I got, and head out into the drizzle.
It’s been raining almost every day for weeks. I love storms, but I don’t love delivering groceries in them. Soggy shoes are nasty, and the paper bags certain stores insist on using don’t hold up well when they get wet. And going into heavily air-conditioned supermarkets when you’re soaked to the skin is an unpleasant experience all its own.
But man, is the dreary weather a vibe.
For writer-types like me, these are the days you just want to turn on the softest lights you’ve got, play a little ambient lo-fi, keep the hot coffee coming, and savor the deep shadows and the interplay of mood and language.
For some reason I can’t remember, one afternoon I find myself trying to figure out the difference between the Japanese and Chinese meanings of the word Ma.
In Chinese, Ma has to do with the unique characteristic of Szechuan peppercorns. It’s not just a conventional spice, but has a tingly, numbing effect, almost like your mouth is going to sleep. It’s where dishes like Mapo Tofu get their name. So when I come across a reference to the word Ma in a Japanese context, I assume it means something similar. But I look it up, and it isn’t. In Japanese, Ma has to do with the space between things. With the shape that empty space can take, almost like the emptiness is a piece of furniture you just can’t see.
Isn’t the space between things a kind of spice for life? I wonder.
It’s either a deep thought, or a corny one. I can’t decide.
All I know is that some things need more space than others. Sometimes we linger in the in-between.
A young, plain-looking woman who ordered a case of hard seltzer on a hot, muggy afternoon comes out of the house under an approaching thunderstorm wearing a “Whores Not Wars” t-shirt and short shorts. I decide not to ask, even though it’s tempting. We talk instead, as I check her ID, about how hard it is to get a new license at the North Carolina DMV. There’s a cop car parked in front of the row of houses, closer to her place than the one next door, and I wonder if it’s hers. She seems too young to be a cop, but then again, she’s old enough to buy alcohol. I realize with regret that I have reached an age where everyone under 35 is starting to look indistinguishably youthful to me.
The days are all variations on a theme. Wake up, drink coffee, take supplements, browse email, check notifications, reply to people, post some thoughts, go out to work, take notes or talk to my clanker or listen to a book while on the road, come home, make dinner, pour a drink, realize I’m too tired to write, lie down and watch a long podcast or something more entertaining, allow the sound of voices coming through the television to feel almost like human presence, grab a snack far too late that I shouldn’t be eating, then realize it’s 3AM and force myself to go to sleep.
Every once in a while, something unusual happens.
On one unusual Saturday, when every order seems like an adventure into the unexpected, I find myself stopping short near the intersection of the nuts and the gluten-free aisle to let a young woman pass so we don’t run into each other. She is wearing a formal gown in a muted floral print, and walks with a pronounced limp. The movement it produces looks like the kind that comes from a congenital hip defect, the sort that causes a drastic rocking of the upper body forward and back with every step. She stops and turns to face a shelf, and I freeze in my tracks.
She has one of the most beautiful faces I’ve ever seen.
Porcelain skin, crystal blue eyes, a soft symmetry of features in perfect arrangement. She’s unselfconsciously singing along under her breath to the pop song playing over the store speakers, and there’s an aura of something almost angelic about her. It’s become so uncommon to see an attractive woman in public who isn’t overtly sexualized in some way that she stands out by contrast. Her upper back and shoulders are bare, but her floor-length dress is otherwise modest, and covers her up to the neck in the front. Her brown hair is swept into an elegant up-do, curls spilling out the back, and there’s something pure in her entire mien.
That’s a face that could launch a thousand ships, I think, but I don’t want to stare, so I quickly move away.
I am reminded almost immediately of Dante glimpsing Beatrice on the streets of Florence. Some encounters with beauty have a transcendent, almost numinous quality. I only caught sight of her for a couple of seconds, but the felt residue of an experience of something otherworldly stays with me for most of the afternoon.
There’s a strange randomness woven within the repetitive pattern of my days. Each order, each storm, each time my car stereo decides to work or not to work for no apparent reason, each morning I decide to sneak in some writing even if it cuts into my working hours like a roll of the dice in some game about making the most of a mundane life. A choose-your-own adventure book that never manages to be particularly exciting, but you keep turning the pages, hoping it’ll get better by the end.
I realize, stumbling across the word “ataraxia” in a meme, a word I used to know but always forget the definition of, that I’m finally starting to experience a little of what it means: the quiet freedom that arrives when your heart finally stops fighting what it cannot change.
Three weeks on, I’m still thinking every day about Odysseus being told that he can’t control his fate, not this time, and he has to surrender to the storm if he wants the gods to let him go home. I don’t know what home looks like anymore. I know it’s people every bit as much as it’s a place, and when you don’t have either, all you’re left with is your own sorry company.
But I still know I need to find it. So I embrace the storm.
I do my best to roll with the punches, to resist fighting the tide, if there’s even a chance that comforting, familiar shores lie somewhere beyond the maelstrom.
On a night I decide to change my routine and do some reading before zoning out in front of the television screen, I open a book of poetry I purchased from a used bookstore, real paper and real words, and there’s Bukowski talking about an old man, dead in a room, and the lines hit like thunderclaps beneath the soft glow of my nightstand lamp:
bone is bone
but this thing upon me
as I tear the window shades
and walk caged rugs,
this thing upon me
like a flower and a feast,
believe me
is not death and is not
glory
and like Quixote’s windmills
makes a foe
turned by the heavens
against one man;
…this thing upon me,
great god,
this thing upon me
crawling like snake,
terrifying my love of commonness,
some call Art
some call Poetry;
it’s not death
but dying will solve its power
and as my grey hands
drop a last desperate pen
in some cheap room
they will find me there
and never know
my name
my meaning
nor the treasure
of my escape.
If you liked this essay, please consider subscribing—or send a tip (Venmo/Paypal/Stripe) to support me and my work.