Orienteering in the World Wide WildMart: a half-wit slacker's manifesto for a millennial busy body; or, how to feed a hungry ghost on Happy Meals

“We are determined to be starved before we are hungry”—Henry David Thoreau


Mid-day at the Super Stop and Shop, and the swell of shoppers is almost enough to keep me from hunting down my favorite brands of oat bran and strained plain yogurt; the sound of the Miserly and Count-happy Self Checkout “Voice” is doubled and echoed and troubles the constant doot, doot, doot of the Barcode Scan Suite. I am an ever present presence living in the moment of my present presence:

Dammit; they’re outta my cereal; damn. . .

I have to steer around two illegally parked and over-loaded carts belonging to two women who are obviously “catching up.” You see this all the time at groceries. I honestly believe there should be an easy-to-scan Guide to negotiating the expected dialogue in these ever present reunions; said guides can be conveniently printed out on the back of those red-striped coupon receipts I never use. No, I don’t want 20 cents off the competitor’s oat bran; I want my oat bran, dammit. And maybe that handy shopper’s list of pseudo-“quick text-esque” pre-scripted talking points for the Reunion in Aisle 32 Dialogue and quick Mop-up. One of the first things the hybrid coupon-guide should offer is a reminder that other people will still need to negotiate around your ass, so please park it by the olives, thanks.

“Yeah! Oh. Nice! Yeah? Nice. Yeah, I haven’t been there, but, yeah, we wanna do something too. Get out, ya know? Yeah, when the weather gets good, we’re gonna take the kids ta Bear Mountain, you know? Camping, we’re thinkin’. But I don’t know. We don’t have anything, you know? I keep meanin’ to get ova to the Sports Authority,” she points toward the shelves of olives, with the promise of tents and mosquito netting somewhere behind the pimentos and continues with a loud pause, “but I always end up here! . . .”

Yes, here we are indeed, and her gesture nearly taps my glasses off my face with one red polished poke, but I find my way around them, despite the Olive Pit-Stop Shoulder Violation.

The day would somehow continue a thread that found me here (in this virtual pit stop) as well.


“Buildings are going up everywhere! Workers raise steel girders higher and higher into the air. . . . Inside the unfinished building more people are working. They measure and cut boards. They plaster and paint walls. They connect pipes and wires. . . .”

“. . .Someday many people will have their offices here.”
--From Busy Day, Busy People, Tibor Gergely


Reading from those pages for the first time again after all these years left me reeling with nostalgia.

“. . . this was my favorite childhood book,” I said as I stared in absolute awe at the present before me. “I can’t believe this, love – it. . . it was my favorite . . . I remember I could stare at the people working and shopping and doing and being for hours, and oh! I loved this book! I can’t believe you found it. . .”

. . .

When I first met my darlin’, I told him the story of the "Four Books." You see, I can pretty much trace the bizarre nature of my wanderin’ ways to four Random House “Please Read to Me” PictureBack Books I received as gifts in my wee, wee tot years; four books, each purchased during a different visit to either the Paramus Park or Woodbridge Center Joisey-Mecca-Malls. I can actually remember traces of image and sensation from when my dad purchased “the” book of the four; we sat outside of the Waldenbooks on the edge of the Penny-Wishes-Magic-Fountain (well, that’s what I called it) by the Food Court which held the sweet promise of pork fried rice mingled with chlorine-laced wishes. I’m pretty sure he began to read it aloud to me then and there, just like the interior of the cover page implored adults to do in my name. I was so excited; a new book! And look! There was so much going on in those pictures! People! Look at all the things they do and buy and do! Look!

“It’s morning in the city!” my dad must have read those first lines dozens of times.

“People are hurrying to work and to school. Some stop to watch the construction workers who are already busy digging and hauling dirt, mixing and pouring cement, lifting and lowering pipes. A new building is just beginning!” reads the first page.

I suppose I have always been a half-wit in training, always wondering at the dynamic dance of “people” and the things we do, even those busy but “fictional” peeps found in the pages of Tibor Gergely’s childhood classic Busy Day, Busy People. On that first page, alive with the color of red and blue on cranes and yellow-helmet flash against the dull of soon-to-be-hidden dirt that was once perhaps something of a greener shade in a different imagination or page, there’s another story being constructed; yes, within that page, the one with children and adults cramming and peering into the dig through cut-outs in the temporary wall separating the site from the already-made outside beyond its bounds, our own collective fabrication is rendered.

“The supermarket is crowded with people. Some are busy putting food up on the shelves. Some are busy taking it down” – Busy Day, Busy People, Tibor Gergely


In the latest edition of Adbusters, the message is obvious and unmistakable: we are purchasing our disenfranchisement and demise, one occluding object scan at a time. My darlin’ knows how much I dig that particular publication, so he came home with it yesterday among the other purchases he carried over to the kitchen table. Fresh flowers, bottled water, and our favorite “healthy junk” snacks (artifacts recovered from a Whole Foods hike) now tumbled out and crowded my already-abundantly-messy table: receipts for previous purchases of healthy junk I always forget to throw out; furniture and clothing and alternative health catalogs I never seem to get around to, and my latest learnin' obsession: Buddhist practice and scripture-study evidenced by dog-eared books, contemplative CD jackets, and random notes scrawled on as-of-yet-to-be-paid credit card bills, these accoutrements would soon add to the faux attempt at Ikebana I’d make out of those gifted petals still wrapped in pink and green cellophane. “Ohh! Eucalyptus! Mmmmm. . . I love the smell of eucalyptus!” Out came the slightly chipped forest green glass vase and in went the stalk. Or branch. I don’t know really, because I’ve never seen a Eucalyptus plant “out there” in the domesticated or wild places where Eucalyptus plant fragrances roam; I’ve only experienced eucalyptus in essential oil pots, Vicks Vapo-Rub, pink and clear cellophane, and now in my forest green vase. I was so excited about the flowers and the new copy of one of my fave periodicals that I didn’t see him sneak over to the dining room to hide the precious-memory-busy book he would later surprise me with as I sat and sketched and snarked out my, um, Wilderness Log. Diverted by petals and periodical, he recounted his day and mused about his visit to his folks “back home”.


“In the city the department store is having a busy day, too. Crowds of people hurry to buy things. Everybody wants help right away! Sales people see that they find what they want. Below the store people work underground. They sell things to subway riders” – Busy Day, Busy People, Tibor Gergely

“Wait . . . wait. I . . . I don’t get it; you didn’t have a ‘town,’ or a ‘neighborhood’; you grew up in a. . .”

“‘development,’ yes. And no: no Main Street, no corner delis, no ‘corners’ really; we had a corner property, but we didn’t have a basement. Actually, no one had a basement in my development except for one house,” he said and I wondered at the concept and construct of the neighborhood translated into “development”. A community founded on, well, seemingly foundation-less-ness. “Coffee shops are Dunkin Doughnuts on Rte 9; 'neighborhood restaurants'? Try Applebee’s. The place is built around a highway; the whole place is built around that highway,” he looked out my kitchen window which offers the pathetic view of the Walgreens I frequent. I may have Main Streets, corner delis and coffee shops, but my views can rival Bartleby’s with brick and Walgreen-window-dressing.

. . .

I first discovered his past “Development Life” and had what would be the ghost of the above dialogue almost a year ago today, from that same kitchen table which seems the center of my small, small world. Growing up in an ethnic, working-class factory town of row-houses, two family Jack Green’s, and concrete front lawns, I couldn’t understand what it meant to live or grow up in a “Development” and not a “neighborhood.” “Development” was a process in my mind, something that something is “in” or “under”. Suburban life as it is imagined in the grid of Development was as foreign to me as the artifacts of ancient and lost peoples dramatized on display at the Natural History Museum we occasionally like to visit. And now, as he sat at my table once again, and once again recounted the ways Wyrd of the return home and back again, I become aware of the distance he feels and the lament in love song when he reports a “new Dunkin Doughnuts” is up; he discovered it on his way to his hometown—er—community’s Super Stop and Shop located on a highway that still recalls the history of our neon-rainbow-colored highway connection.

Despite the new, new, new of it all, there are the telling towers of the past; and while my home town was built around river and factory, and his around a highway, we’re still connected in that buzz and hum of the mercantile. In the end, the trucks that ran through that highway-home were perhaps loaded with cargo hauled on hooks that hung in creepy order of size/shape in my parents’ basement. My father, a poet-photographer-guitarist-dreamer 6 credits shy of his Bachelor’s degree in Bio/Pre-Med, gave it all up for reasons I'll never know but frame as a distaste in his brain and ache in his heart that lead him tumbling toward a deeper sorrow in that infamous former theater of war which serves as our current conundrum’s cultural touchstone. Unable to find his way back to being a "student" and in order to provide that roof over head and the quality of cement-ground I will never again find for roller skate, he followed his fisherman father’s footsteps and got a job as a longshoreman for Port Elizabeth. When my students discover and wonder why I in the world I find the NJ Turnpike to be poetry in motion, I can only sometimes suggest, "You should see the Ports at night."

. . .

I stood over the sink, rinsed the last dinner dish and recalled the way the cigar, sweat and salt-smell my dad’s flannels used to both comfort and embarrass me.


“Back and forth go the plates! When they are filled, they go into the dining room. When they are empty, they go back to the kitchen. There the plates have to be washed and ready to use again” – on the work of dinner time at restaurants in Busy Day, Busy People, Tibor Gergely

The images in the latest Adbusters are perhaps even more haunting and urgent than usual. Focused on the various facets of alienation in our global Development, your eyes scan across pages of hungry and contorted children and adults alike, bodies hidden, bare, exposed and crushed; people pushed into spaces of “just enough” to ensure and maximize efficiency and the "natural" world we now only virtually inhabit and experience as a wilderness Flickr display projected and reflected on LCD billboards aside skyscrapers. I was stirred by the images and especially struck by the article on China’s equivalent to our Technosexual Millennial Gen Yers: those who are known as the ‘80ers. Being in the position of professing to a mostly Millennial milieu, I am privy to the ways in which the In2U peeps have been positioned and are positioning themselves. I have sat through “Professional Development” cred-meriting “Faculty Days” where I’ve been warned against the whirring blades of “helicopter moms” and their structure-happy, tolerant and tested, multi-tasking Users. Being used to the freedom of expression in the confined concentric spaces of Scantron satisfaction surveys, many of my students shudder at an essay-centric course. “I hate 2 rite,” is a line I’ve read often enough that I’ve decided a bumper sticker is in order. But while some are hatin’ on the pen and suffer from Blinking Cursor Syndrome, there are many more mad for the performance, or for performing well, performing with “excellence,” of course. Apparently, our ‘80ers brothas and sistas share similar pleasure in performance anxiety; it’s a small, small development, after all:

“Even among younger members of the ‘80ers . . . we see similar trends toward dismal pragmatism. In 2005, the Research Center of Chinese Youth conducted a nationwide survey among students of primary, middle and high schools in both cities and the countryside. The results show that 57 percent found the content of their textbooks boring or useless. Yet 58 percent of the students said they hope to earn a Ph.D., and 42 percent considered having good test scores the happiest thing in their lives [ emphasis added]. (In comparison, only 19 percent regarded ‘play as much as one wants’ the happiest thing)”
(“Wo Jiu Xihuan [‘I’m Loving It’]”, Yunxiang Yan).

I want to bring the article in to use as a talking point with my peeps. It’s the end of the semester, and we’re all barely breathing at this point. My students work, and they work hard. Bakers, waitresses, retail clerks and nurses aides, many of my students find themselves caught in the cycle of work vs school that our modern day Education Industrial Complex of Excellence scripts in a draining and static dialectic that haunts the essays and student essayists most certainly left behind.

In an Honors American Literature course I have the snarky pleasure to co-profess, we recently finished covering those tree-hugging Transcendentalists types such as the likes of the oft quoted man of deliberation, Henry David Thoreau. As it is an “honors” course, many of these students have one aim in mind: to succeed deliberately. With “A”s emblazoned on their chests, framing the heart-sign of their desire, they work through puzzling lectures which ask them to read Whitman out loud at shopping malls and “take a risk! Have fun!” with their essay exams. I was slightly heart broken at some of my peeps' responses to my hermano Walt: "Scattered," and "Unfocused," and "I didn't get him; he's all over the place!" were the major threads in the theme of their initial complaints. We talked over some of their trepidations, and maybe I've won over a convert or two; but then, again, that's not the point. Not mine. I want critical thinking and they want to know what I "want" in their response essays: "Is this what you wanted? I'm not sure if it's right," goes the mantra.

The mirror of my requirements, however, sends back the estranged image of their requests rather than the expected and desired bullet listed manual for getting it right and writing what I'm "looking for"; instead, the mirror throws back and bent the dynamic, shifting and potentially three dimensional bodies-in-relation that we can be if we just looked and listened. I discuss the fact that they want to know what I "want" and start the Socratic by asking them why they believe that has become their inquiry in the quest for knowledge. And I understand my obvious idealism cannot transcend the truth: these are the sons and daughters of sons and daughters who found hope and home by rivers and highways and packed dreams in car ports and garages for lack of basements or those creepy climate controlled storage facilities. They want the other road offered in the "A," in the "piece of paper" exchange. They want the chance to be on the buying end of the Buy Buy Baby counter. And, well, could I please tell them how to get there in five paragraphs or less?

Honestly: how could I blame them?


"At the end of the day people are glad to go home. Tonight they will rest and see their families. Tomorrow will be another busy day!" --Busy Day, Busy People


So, I found myself once again at the Super Stop and Shop and once again I left without what I was looking for, never mind what I "needed". And his gift later that day made me lose my bearings a bit; I was me again: a curious child who could spend hours and hours doing nothing but playing my way toward some discovery or another, playing until I somehow forgot how to play, and became too "busy" to call my friends, go for a walk or just, well, listen to the world read me its story the way my book asks. And I am not alone, it seems.

We, kinda like a Bizzaro Blend of Doozers ceaselessly building, and Fraggles ceaselessly consuming (forgive my final fall into childhood trope-speak. . .), are constructing and consuming a world we apparently cannot sustain, despite our current and founding fictions. Yet and still, we build and build, and still again, we buy and buy, and load our carts with hope and promise-logo-jingle-wish (the grown-up version of the Penny-Wishes-Magic-Fountain-Wish) perhaps to fill a void that’s dug down, deep, beneath, something we modern day hungry ghosts must find and feed.

. . .

"Can you read it to me?" he asked and smiled.

I turned toward the former-ash-tray-now-change-collector which sits atop my microwave and spied the pennies collected there: "Heads, you read; tails, I do."

I flipped.

We decided on a draw and took turns instead.