Shadows for Breakfast

Nowhere to go but the road to nowhere

by Wes Biggs

When I'm a bum I'm going to have the biggest shopping cart in the world. I'm going to have a shopping cart so big you could only use it in CosCo, and only in the furniture section. Chrome-plated wheel guards, double-reinforced brackets. If I'm going to live on the streets, I'm going to do it in style.

This is my Kodachrome daydream: those who can, shop; those who can't shop live in shopping carts. America's got consumption, dig? There's no getting away from it. We're picking up mementos wherever we go. Crossing things off our list. Buying what's in Vogue or at least Glamour.

Is it irony or is it Memorex? The less privileged take refuge in the accouterments of royalty, these chariots of consumption. It's the esprit de spree, except there's no glory in their quests for trifles and no one to wow with today's treasures.

When I'm a bum I'm going to collect pure culture. I won't discriminate between Diet Rite and Coca Cola. Aluminum is a two-and-a-half cent commodity. The rest is eye candy. Stripped of its ornaments, culture is the guy who lives in the tunnel downtown. He's got two shopping carts. I don't know what's in them. I don't know if he knows. But it's all there.

That's all I need, really. Give me a box with wheels and enough knickknacks to keep me rolling. That's all I've got, really, all I can really have in this world. The rest is eye candy, and I'm perhaps as guilty of optometric gluttony as any. I'm drooling. I want a suburban home.

Four years later--and with a veritable plethora of knickknacks--I can't recall when I gave up the simple life. Four years later, and not a lot to show for it, really. Maybe I've just got my priorities wrong. Sometimes I can believe that, lying down with headphones cranked way up listening to "The Real Me." My friends are getting married. I'd be happy for them.

All the concrete in the world won't make a road to nowhere any more appealing, no matter what kind of fuel economy you get. I don't care about fuel economy. I just want to know where I'm getting off. Where do I get off? Where do I get off feeling so cozy in my insular nothingness? Yeah, I've got it all figured out, girl, just you wait and see.

But I sit here on my radioactive treadmill and laugh at the rat race and never quite manage to look you in the eye. I start sentences I don't know how to finish, don't want to finish anyhow, and all the while I'm wondering where he got that shopping cart, because there's not a grocery store for miles.

Shop `til you drop, man. I'll be watching and waiting. I'll write onomatopoems of love to the clickety-clack of your wheels in the aisles of despair. Kodachrome is a registered trademark for colored film. This is my exit. This is where I get off.