8.05.2025

I bring to the pharmacy clerk's attention the qualities of the wrinkle spray I'm purchasing:

So you can fake it, she says
Exactly, I've been traveling a lot and this stuff makes it look like I know what I'm doing
I have to get some of these
I grabbed the last three bottles, sorry, they're hard to find. I don't know what's in the formula and I don't want to know
She laughs
I don't need a receipt, thanks, but now you know my darkest secret

It was easy, writing dialogue, when I lived here before. Some days every interaction is Bananas Foster. In environments like this you soak up conversations. Every trip outside is a full immersion bath. At Walgreen's I let the noise take me for a few seconds and it was dystopian and perverse. All the chatter at the registers and kids yelling and playing in the aisles and announcements over the PA that associates were needed in the bath and body aisle, in the analgesics aisle, in the foot pain department.

Late afternoons when I returned to my apartment in Logan Square and after I walked the dog I'd lie down on the couch and fall into a black sleep but in the few minutes before I passed out I heard soundscapes just like this, as if I were receiving telepathic transmissions, only no one was saying anything important. Like I was standing in line at the pharmacy. Residual noise repurposed for coherence. Sometimes in languages I recognize but do not speak.