In November, after the Kroger next to my apartment installed a system of security cameras and monitors, assumedly to cut down on shoplifting by making it clear that SOMEONE WAS ALWAYS WATCHING, even if that someone was you, I began visiting the store regularly, for no real reason other than to watch myself walk around: a closed-circuit out-of-body experience. I had been spending a lot of time alone in my apartment, having quit my job in advertising in order to become a middle school English teacher. It had become clear to me, though, in the two months since I’d quit my job in order to become a middle school English teacher, that I wasn’t MIDDLE SCHOOL ENGLISH TEACHER MATERIAL. This was mainly due to something I’d realized during a routine classroom observation at J. L. Long Middle School, one of thirty classroom observations required to become a middle school teacher in Texas. I’d realized that middle schoolers were little pieces of shit.
“Well what did you expect?” J said, herself an English teacher and a person of reasonable expectations.
And I said that I’d expected the same thing about teaching middle school that I’d expected about every other thing in my entire life. “I expected it to be easier.”
The white, flat screen security monitors at Kroger were mounted at the ends of the aisles and above the touch-screen computers at the self-check-out kiosks. A sign beneath the monitors explained that YOU ARE BEING MONITORED. The words were printed in a bold, sans serif font that revealed no emotion, neither accusation nor nonchalance. It was, it seemed, up to us what we did with this information. The reverse of Las Vegas’s no-mirrors-in-the-casino trick. In the grocery store, you were confronted over and over again with yourself. A closed circuit (see: Closed Circuits). A feedback loop (see: Feedback Loops). I was both the observer and the thing observed (See: The Hawthorn Effect).
[The Hawthorn Effect]: A contamination via self-consciousness. “A type of reactivity,” Wikipedia warns us, “in which individuals modify an aspect of their behavior in response to their awareness of being observed.”
[Feedback Loops]: A perpetual motion machine. A circular argument. Its defining characteristic is its loopiness. “This,” Wikipedia tells us, “makes cause and effect tricky…” For more information re: feedback loops, see: Feedback Loops, etc.
[Closed Circuit]: aka CCTV. aka VIDEO SURVAILENCE. According to Wikipedia: “There are about 350 million surveillance cameras worldwide as of 2016.”
I was something of an expert in feedback loops having spent my entire twenties in advertising agencies creating them. You could live inside a feedback loop. Nobody knows for how long. My brother who works for NASA tells me that astronauts on the International Space Station are taught twenty-seven different ways of preparing human shit. Due to a clerical error I’d spent my entire twenties in advertising, creating feedback loops via Facebook’s sophisticated audience-targeting algorithms, making the world a loopier and loopier place. The clerical error was this: I’d forgotten to quit.
By the time I’d finally remembered to quit — and had, in fact, quit, having walked into my boss’s office one morning and said the words “I quit” and then having filed the necessary I QUIT paperwork, including an I’M SERIOUS clause and an I REALLY MEAN IT THIS TIME addendum, along with the complex, privacy-invading application for state continuation of my health insurance — it was October 2017, an unseasonably warm month within an unseasonably cold year in Dallas, Texas, a city known for its unseasonableness. At any time you can ask someone who lives in Dallas what the weather is like and their answer will be “Unseasonable!” It’s not that we don’t have seasons. It’s just that our seasons get all jumbled up. We experience the normal amount of each season in small, random increments throughout the year.
I was, I felt, in a season myself. Or, more accurately, I was in a season of myself. It was me season. I was really on my mind. To make the most of this self-referential portion of my life, I established a daily routine of sleeping in until 10am, drinking an entire pot of coffee between 10am and 11:30am, and pouring my first drink by noon. With J at work, there was no one around to see the sick, lazy son of a bitch I was becoming. No one, that is, but myself. I seemed to be fine with it. I would, as a ritual, tap my glass of vodka against the mirror in the kitchen and say, “Cheers, asshole,” fully aware of the rich metaphorical connotations available to me within this action, were I the rich metaphorical connotations type, which I am not. As far as I’m concerned, that’s your job.
“How’s becoming a middle school English teacher going?” J would ask when she got home around 5pm, her shoulders weighed down with tote bags full of 3rd graders’ homework. By then I’d’ve been drunk, sobered up again, and would be cracking open my first beer of the night, a beer I thought of as my “Night Beer.” I would give her an enthusiastic thumbs-up and then do this thing I do where I make my eyes sparkle like someone just blew a handful of glitter into them.
To help maintain the illusion that I was, in fact, on my way to becoming a middle school English teacher, I left various English teaching materials AROUND, such as the TExES ELA 4-8 study guide, which guaranteed to help aspiring middle school English teachers pass their TExES ELA 4-8 exam, and a book called Who’s (Oops, Whose) Grammar Book Is This Anyway? by C. Edward Good, which I claimed I was using to BONE UP on the basic concepts of the English language “like commas and stuff” in order to become a more authoritative, effortlessly-knowledgeable figure in the classroom. Before J got home from work, I would go around the apartment turning the pages of these books and highlighting various sentences and paragraphs and generally futzing around with things in order make it seem as though this were a place where things were being futzed with and not, as the case was, a place where absolutely nothing was happening whatsoever.
By the time I admitted to myself that I had no intention of actually becoming a middle school English teacher, having had my realization re: middle schoolers, along with a secondary realization re: MY COMPLETE LACK OF INTEREST IN TEACHING, I had wasted more than two months putting on what I’d thought of as THE PERFORMANCE OF A LIFETIME, a performance I had been putting on almost exclusively for myself.
“Well what did you expect?” J said in November, when the unseasonable warmth had turned into an unseasonable rain.
“In order to better serve you and keep our low low prices low, we have installed a new security monitoring system for your benefit,” a free-standing sign at the front of Kroger read. “Thank you for your continued loyalty.”
I had gotten into the habit of going to the grocery store in the middle of the day, when people my age were supposed to be at work, and buying heavily discounted MANAGER SPECIAL items that were days — sometimes hours — away from expiration. The store was empty then except for elderly men and women who rode up and down the aisles on electric scooters, knocking down out-of-reach items with their canes. Often these were the only people I’d see all day. I went out of my way to run into them in hopes of having a MEANINGFUL ENCOUNTER WITH A STRANGER. I wanted, if nothing else, to say something to someone and have them say something back. It was one of the things I missed most about being around people. How you could say things to them and how they would sometimes say things back. When you go too long without saying things to people, you start saying things to yourself, a habit I’d been in since I was seven years old and started narrating my own life to myself in the third person limited, as if I were a character in a novel and that novel’s narrator. I understood immediately that, having started doing this, I would never be able to stop.
I’ve since learned that talking about yourself in the third person is a popular stress-relief technique. “A kind of detachment,” the stress-relief website tells me, which I misread as “a kind detachment,” and think: Yes, exactly, a friendly LOPPING OFF.
But now I was not only talking about myself, I was talking to myself. And then about myself talking to myself to myself, etc, etc, into infinity: a post-modern twist on an otherwise plotless existential novel. In order to untwist it, I knew I needed to get back into the habit of talking to other people, the only other people available being the elderly afternoon shoppers at the Kroger on Mockingbird Lane.
“How about all this weather we’re having!” I said to an old woman who was knocking cups of red Jell-O off the top shelf and onto the floor, where they exploded like squibs.
“Could these prices be any lower!” I said to what was surely an octogenarian, poking a peach with a suspicious look on her face.
“Hell of a year for oranges,” I said to an old man whose eyebrows reached up into his hair. Behind him, on the security monitor, I could see myself talking to him while watching myself on the security monitor, talking to him. I tried to act natural. I didn’t want myself to know that I knew that I was being watched. I watched myself discreetly, out of the corner of my eye, hoping I wouldn’t realize that I was the one doing the watching.
It wasn’t entirely clear what I was going to do with myself now that it was entirely clear what I wasn’t going to do with myself: i.e. teach English to middle schoolers. “What do people do with themselves,” I asked J as we drove to one of the three or four places we go, “besides work in advertising and teach English to middle schoolers?”
J said, “I think some people are welders.”
To make a little extra money on the side (the side of what? I remember thinking) — money I desperately needed in order to fund my vodka habit, a habit which had become substantial (A habit of substance! I told myself. A substance habit!) — I’d started selling off everything we owned on Craigslist. I used the skills I’d learned in advertising such as ESTABLISHING A SENSE OF URGENCY and the MAKING STUFF SOUND SUPER SEXY. I also intentionally broke a few rules of English grammar — rules I’d accidentally become an expert in while pretending to become an expert in them — in order to sound like what I thought of as A REAL PERSON. Trustworthy in my haphazard attention to detail. Relatable in my lack of grammatical know-how. I left out certain commas and split certain infinitives. I didn’t always capitalize the word I.
After I’d posted an item on Craigslist, I would open an INCOGNITO window in Google Chrome and go find my own post, as if I were a person in the market for the very thing I happened to be selling, which I was. I was my own ideal customer, having already bought the thing in the first place, and, assuming I would sell it soon, would soon be in need of it again. My marketing persona (another one of my agency tricks!) was a semi-educated, existentially-depressed young un-professional with a modest disposable income and a bottomless pit of desire located halfway between his rectum and his anus. He drove a Sentra.
More than once, after finding an item I’d posted on Craigslist, I took the post down, having decided to keep the item for myself. A perk, I reasoned, of being me. “This guy’s gone loopy!” I said to myself about myself one day, out loud, staring at myself staring at myself in the mirror above the fireplace.
The cameras/monitors at Kroger weren’t the only feedback loop I’d found myself in. The year before, the city had installed a radar/display contraption on Mockingbird Lane that told you your own speed, the speed you were already going, any repercussions being purely self-inflicted, purely HAWTHORNIAN. How do YOU feel about how fast you’re going? the sign seemed to say, a bit passive aggressively I felt.
Also: I’d discovered some disturbing differences between Googling my own name in a regular Google Chrome search window and Googling it in INCOGNITO MODE. I couldn’t help feeling that my computer was only ever telling me exactly what I wanted to hear. But what I wanted to hear wasn’t always what I wanted to hear. Not exactly. Sometimes I wanted to hear something else. But how is it possible, I wondered, to want what I don’t want.
Cause and effect are tricky. It can be hard to tell which is which. In the elevator of my old office, the office I left in order to not become a middle school English teacher, a pair of mirrors projected versions of me on either side, out into infinity. I would look at myself out of the corner of my eye, tan Filson bag slung over my shoulder, looking, I thought, very PUT TOGETHER. An invitation, it turned out, to take myself apart.
As far as we know, the longest time ever spent inside a feedback loop was spent by a retired mechanical engineer from Long Beach, California named Gordon something or other, who entered his feedback loop in spring of 1987 as a kind of joke and didn’t emerge until January 20th of last year, when he pulled his head out of his own ass to have a look around.
“Aaaaaand?” reporters said, having gathered for the occasion.
Gordon shrugged. “You tell me,” he said.
Not much it turned out.
In December all the food in our apartment expired and I started smelling my own hands. The smell was stale, organic, and not entirely off putting. It smelled like vegetables kind of. It was the smell of a person who wasn’t getting out very much. I started to crave it. I would sit in my apartment with my hand under my nose, covering my mouth, breathing myself in, like a respirator.
A Möbiusstrip: There’s no seeing the other side of this thing.
On Christmas Eve, at the Cork & Barrel liquor store across the street from Kroger, I watched myself on the security monitor, split-screen from four simultaneous angles. I was handing a 1-liter plastic bottle of Club Soda to the clerk. A glimpse of omniscience. I wiggled my hand in a secret way to make sure it was really me up there. There was a slight time delay. A spatial and temporal detachment. Just a little more lopping off to go and my job here will be done. There he is, I thought. That’s him. Signs around the store told me to SMILE. “Smile” was written in bold, sans-serif, manically-large font. Above the word, as a smiling-example, there was a bright yellow smiley face, smiling so big he’d closed his eyes. Well that’s one way of doing it, I thought. I’ve never smiled so big in my entire life. I haven’t blinked since October. When I walked out of the liquor store into the sixty-degree winter warmth, the men on the security monitor scattered in every direction.
