20. the song "halfway gone" by lifehouse
When had the grocery store become such a monument to despair?
Ishida, Tetsuya. Supermarket. 1997. Acrylic on board. Private collection.
Under lights the color of an old canvas, the Malcontent reached his hand through a thin plastic bag, like a surgical glove, and inspected Granny Smith apples.
He bobbed them in his palm, assessing their heft, spinning them close to his face in case of bruising.
He didn’t know why he did this, as he tended to commit to produce once he’d plucked it from the bin. And anyway, it was an apple. You know. Of the earth? What degree of intestinal havoc could it possibly wreak?
No, he had no reason, really, to interrogate the fruits, beyond the force of habit, it being a learned behavior from childhood trips to the grocery store, needling his parents with his needy clinging, his keen and constant gawking of their practice.
In recent years, grocery shopping had been a dismal chore, DeLillo’s cynical supermarket wonder be damned. It was an avenue of small talk as routine as the weather: my god, have you seen the price of eggs this week?
But it was true, the prices were untenable. Pasta with premade sauce notwithstanding, most recipes worth their salt (and fat, and acid, and heat) were just as expensive as a value meal bought from a casual restaurant, he being (no surprise) a loveless bastard without kids or cats for which to care.
A bill for a scant week of food now soared into triple digits, and the burden of meals had swollen to such a bulbous extent that he’d finally taken oft-repeated advice and employed a grocery list to keep from over-shopping. Granted, about fifteen dollars of that bill was comprised of sparkling waters and Coke Zeros, but he simply could not become the smug skinflint who drinks exclusively water from the tap.
When had the grocery store become such a monument to despair?
Was it during the pandemic, the act of stocking up suddenly fraught with cerebral concerns of personal health, and the health of the community?
Was it when he moved to California, and the culture of boutique groceries, your Gelsons and Erewhons, forced unruly notions of luxury onto an otherwise uncomplicated custom?
Was it, quite simply, when he moved to college and had to pay for shit himself?
Whenever the indistinct transition into misery had occurred, misery was without doubt the new normal.
He’d heard once that the healthiest approach to a grocery store was to hug the walls, where the fresh items were shelved in humming, open-faced freezers, and avoid the processed temptations of the inner aisles whenever possible.
This, too, was an unhappy framework. Was he really chastising himself for stocking his kitchen with trail mix? Never mind the bagels and Cheez Its which, he would argue, were as essential to sustaining his life as any water, tap or sparkling.
Bemoaning a non-issue such as the grocery store made him feel crotchety and hard-to-please, like that old guy on 60 Minutes. What was his name? He couldn’t recall.
So, he didn’t share this sentiment with others, but he had tired of buying groceries. Until they invented new foods, he was over it.
Tossing four vetted apples in the belly of his shopping cart, he attuned to his surroundings. As one would expect, adult contemporary was playing overhead, stuffing the open air with vapidity like packing peanuts, semi-frequently interrupted by store-wide announcements about exciting new deals, and necessary assistance in the poultry section.
The song at present was familiar, in the same way as cystic acne: a nuisance which nevertheless reared its (black)head well past the age when one thought, or hoped, themselves finished with it.
‘Cause I’m halfway gone, and I’m on my way / and I’m feeling, feeling, feeling this way…
Sheesh, what tripe. He hated that he knew the words, but couldn’t chide himself too harshly, the lyrics being so elementary and first-draft as to suggest artificial intelligence. Words one learned secondhand, without consent, while comparing jars of peanut butter. What respectable artist rhymes ‘way’ with ‘way’? Chris Daughtry, apparently!
The song struck him as the Cocomelon of music: insufferable in its inanity, but impossible to render one too incensed. It was pure background noise, never actively chosen to be consumed, but allowed to persist on account of its unobjectionable nature.
Well, he objected. Fuck this song.
He once thought himself a crusader for the semi-ironic lite-FM staple. Sheryl Crow’s “Soak Up the Sun,” “Everywhere” by Michelle Branch, freaking “Pocketful of Sunshine” – all bangers!
Those songs were familiar in the way of friends from summer camp: not held particularly close, but pleasant enough to run into at random, redolent of breezy afternoons and lemonade on the porch. Suddenly—uh oh, here comes “Halfway Gone,” the kid in the cabin who no one liked, who sniffed his own armpits and used up all the hot water before everyone else was awake.
Of all the shopping centers in all the world, and this dimwitted soft-rock stumbled slovenly into his.
He stopped his cart—rather, he idled by the asparagus, wheeling a half-inch every fifteen seconds, bent across the handlebar and poring over his phone. He couldn’t wait, he just had to know how long he’d been afflicted with this musical tumor. He was cursed by memories of middle school carpools, too deep into the backseat to turn the dial to top-40 proper.
Apparently, he was mistaken. The song was released in 2010, some years after the carpool era.
“Halfway Gone,” it seemed, possessed the spirit of an ancient, shape-shifting demon. Perhaps it had first made itself known as it befell the land thirteen unlucky years ago, but really, it had been with us since the dawn of time. Malevolent, lying in wait.
The song “Halfway Gone” was also, in fact, not by Daughtry, but instead by the band Lifehouse.
Fucking Lifehouse! Of course! They of “You and Me,” another supermarket scourge!
‘Cause it’s you and me, and all of the people / With nothing to do, nothing to lose…
What does that even mean?! Who are you, who is me? And, for the love of God, who are all of the people and what are they doing in my house?!
In his true childhood memories, crystalline as if encased in amber, the songs which populated liminal suburban spaces – grocery stores, bank branches, pediatricians’ offices – skewed more in the direction of Laurel Canyon.
It was unfortunate that his first acquaintances with Karen Carpenter and Carole King transpired in sterile, authoritative facilities such as these, but then, was Karen Carpenter not consistently ‘mothering,’ as the teens put it? Was “So Far Away” not just as soothing and cherished as a cherry lollipop after a series of antibiotic shots?
Lifehouse had no business standing alongside them. As if they were equals. Pfft.
He snatched a bag of butter lettuce, peeved. Maybe this was, in part, how grocery shopping had become such a drag. There was surely no way capitalism bred innovation, because whichever tastemakers had crafted this supposedly optimal environment for purchasing red pepper hummus and vegenaise, their decision-making process had gone totally sideways.
Grim fluorescents, eye-popping market prices, and “Halfway Gone” inducing a migraine store-wide. What a country, what a world.
The Malcontent tended to buy groceries at Vons, or Ralphs. They were economically-minded without evoking bargain bins, and as such he treated them as the working man’s outlet of choice: straightforward, unflashy, patronized midday by retired seniors instead of wannabe influencers (a belief further reinforced by the reliable solicitors at the entrance each trip.)
He’d hate to betray their humble service, almost as much as he’d hate to turn into one of those whites proselytizing for Trader Joe, who had somehow convinced Caucasians of his nutritional superiority, despite most of his product being glorified microwave meals. Then again, he doubted Trader Joe played Lifehouse on his speakers.
No, Joe wore Hawaiian shirts. He was hip, or hip enough. He must bump Vampire Weekend, at very worst Vance Joy.
He was just about finished. He drifted by the bakery, yearning for lemon poppy muffins, but nobly resisting.
In truth, he didn’t love cooking, wasn’t especially skilled at it. He’d recently humiliated himself attempting to dice garlic for a friend, blissfully unaware he hadn’t peeled off the husk, and also that he was cutting up an expired bulb.
Cooking was yet another arena which made him feel inferior, and how could he improve? He would need to practice with new recipes, get comfortable with experimenting and failing, and… my god, have you seen the price of eggs this week?
Of all the so-called innovations to the centuries-old food shopping tradition, self-checkout was by far the most intolerable.
An attendant with a pinched smile stood at the end of the row of machines, unable to check their phone, only able to assist when called upon. The machines blathered without end.
Greetings! If you have your Shoppers Rewards card, you may scan it now.
He did so, then scanned his first item, which happened to be a carton of oat milk.
The machine blurted out: SIX TWENTY NINE.
Narc, he grumbled to himself, wrestling the carton into his crinkly reusable bag before pulling a tub of butter from—
PLEASE RETURN ALL ITEMS TO THE CHECKOUT AREA, the machine insisted.
An overhead video appeared on screen, clearly showing him place the oat milk in his bag. He paused, waited for the technology to get over itself, and finally it allowed him to scan his tub of butter (SIX NINETY-NINE) and place it in the—
PLEASE RETURN ALL ITEMS TO THE CHECKOUT AREA.
He waggled his hand across the scanner, hoping it would register as a foreign item and let him proceed, no different a maneuver than when he reached the intersection by his home and reversed-then-pulled-forward until triggering the stoplight.
Technology often needed to be tickled, he found. He reached into his—
PLEASE RETURN ALL ITEMS … PLEASE WAIT WHILE A REPRESENTATIVE COMES TO ASSIST YOU.
The attendant, who had been surveilling checkout the entire time, clearly seeing him not steal a thing, now marched towards the Malcontent’s malcontent machine. He made way while she tap-tap-tapped into the override with ornate bejeweled fingernails.
The impediment inspired him to take stock of his surroundings. Seniors at parallel machines moved too lugubriously, he supposed, for the robots to get shifty and accuse them of theft.
He faced rows upon rows of checkout lines, all deserted save for one, a ruthlessly efficient cashier and her dutiful bagger doing battle with an extended line of shoppers who refused to self-checkout, who would rather tiptoe across the encroaching afternoon hour by loitering near stacked boxes of cat litter than suffer the machines’ disrespect.
And, all the while, trashing through the air with the soft-harshness of a satin jackhammer:
'Cause you're halfway in, but don't take too long / I'm halfway gone, I'm halfway gone…
Were they playing this fucking song on repeat? Was this the ten-minute extended mix?
Had he hallucinated the song before, so central was it to supermarket heritage? Was the store actually dead silent, and “Halfway Gone” by Lifehouse turned out to be the maddening tune which prodded against the eardrums of purgatory?!
He remembered when the machines were the enemy.
It was possible hindsight had ballooned the topic’s prevalence, but in his boyhood, it sure felt like a sizable number of citizens were indignant, even distraught over the existential crisis of honest American jobs – factory line workers, automobile manufacturers, grocery store cashiers and baggers – being replaced with soulless, faulty tech in the interest of a bottom line which was never in jeopardy for the C-suite.
The machines arrived anyway, wages remained stagnant (or dipped, really, accounting for inflation), and shopping for groceries became the most anxious hour of the week. Everyone was broke, no one was happy, and the machines had even convinced the clowns who pay for Twitter that the A.I. takeover was a good thing.
When did Skynet win the battle? The year 2010, he thought, around the time we all permitted “Halfway Gone,” with its witless oh-oh-ohs and aphorisms as thin as a plastic bag for produce.
The self-checkout attendant restored his machine, and he realized he was still holding his last item, a bottle of psyllium husk fiber supplements.
ELEVEN NINETY-NINE.
The machine was a narc, and it was also, he now knew, homophobic.
He made quick work of scanning the rest of his goods, gulping as the total flashed on screen, and exited with the same degree of haste, past the sweet attendant, past the solemn solicitor, past the overhead speakers as “Halfway Gone” was at long last all the way departed, ceding its airspace to (ugh) “The Reason” by Hoobastank.
…
Andy Rooney!
if you do one thing this week…
…and you have a free ninety minutes, I highly recommend Kevin Perjurer’s investigation into the Disney Channel cable mnemonic, which begins as a lighthearted exercise in Internet sleuthery before evolving into a moving meditation on the artist’s journey.
thanks for being here,
stan