- - - -
Now available for preorder:
The San Francisco Panorama.
- - - -
1 COLAVITA X VIRGIN OLV OIL The purchaser of these items (which totaled $21.13), we can postulate, lives in an apartment with a small kitchen, probably not an eat-in, hence the need for small garbage bags instead of large. This is in line with the theory that some unifying thread can be found among the readers of Denis Johnson's "Jesus' Son," as the author of this piece also has a tiny kitchen. You couldn't even call it a kitchenette, really. More of a kitchenette-ette. However, here the similarities end. The purchase of many items that fall into the category of "ingredients" (that is, things which are generally used in combination in the creation of more complex dishes, as opposed to "stand-alones," which usually involve the slitting of a plastic cover and placement into a microwave oven, or something even less complicated than that) suggests a consumer who fancies himself a bit of a chef. This seems to be borne out by the "EZ Loaf Pan" purchase, which indicates someone who envisions himself cooking not merely one but *three* loaves of some sort. This portrait of a typical-Denis-Johnson-reader-cum-grocery-shopper is at odds with the habits of the author of this piece, whose purchases come overwhelmingly from the "stand-alone" category, as can be seen from the following sample grocery receipt from the local Key Food (which uses a 20-character column width for product descriptions rather than the comparatively generous 25-character D'Agostino standard): 1 HAIN MINI POPCORN RI And this isn't even one of the receipts with Pop-Tarts on it. Additional information can be gleaned from the subjects' methods of payment. Both used cash, but the D'Agostino shopper paid for his $21.13 purchase with two twenty-dollar bills, suggesting a person in a hurry, a person with somewhere to be, whereas the author of this piece meticulously produced an amount of cash that would result in a mininum of returned change (in this case, a twenty-dollar bill, a five-dollar bill, and eight cents for a tab of $24.08), indicating a slightly obsessive personality. Clearly, the subject of the grocery shopping habits of library patrons who check out Denis' Johnson's "Jesus' Son" requires further study.
OTHER McSWEENEY'S STORIES:
There Is No Average Day When You Live in a Port-A-Potty By Todd Butterfly Pruzan Eat the Document By Cathy Alter Manifesto for Themeless Restaurant By Peter Schooff Regarding the Surviving Members of the Grateful Dead and Their Current Taping Policy: A Conversation with the Hippie in the Basement Apartment By Jim Vallet Bad Names for Action Movies By Peter Schooff |
Red dot denotes content that is new today.
Black dot denotes newish content.