I’m driving the BMW to Trader Joe’s. Beth is next to me. I notice that the experience of the car is transformed by who is handling it, much that of a gun or violin. Here the vehicle is purely utilitarian, getting us to where we need to go. I don’t care what it looks like or what it is and I only think about it in terms of how the BMW is not like my own car.
We’re talking about relationships and online dating. I haven’t given Beth the backstory of the avatar, so the things I say apparently horrify her on some level. I haven’t encountered many people who are comfortable with the rhetoric of the quirkyalone. Listening to myself, I know it sounds like I have excluded the entire world save one person.
I’m pushing the shopping cart at Trader Joe’s and reality has gone wobbly for me. I start to lose focus on where I am and suddenly I am in several different stores at once. Beth is asking me something about the grocery list, which has suddenly become indecipherable, the scrawled prescription from a mad chef. I answer noncommittally as the aisles telescope and emotions tumble down the shelves.
We manage to collect the ingredients for guacamole and hummus, dips which Beth insists must never be purchased, always made by hand. Later she would demonstrate her Shaolin avacado cutting style. She has resolved to eat an avacado a day while in California. I also found the frozen chocolate dipped bananas I had been craving.
The ride back is just like the ride there, only in reverse. Which is to say, completely unfamiliar.