Dear Woman Who Was In Front of Me in Line at Winco Last Night and Was Only Buying a Single Bottle of Watermelon Moscato:
I have some questions.
Did you go to Winco with this particular item in mind? Why Winco, a store that is so big and so busy, when you could have bought the same thing at Plaid Pantry with much less time and hassle? Did you pick Winco specifically because you enjoy watching the aimless frenzy of people caught in a situation they did not expect and have no control over? Does the warehouse vibe of Winco, rather than being off-putting to a single-item shopper, instead only add to your thrill of watching the world burn? Tell me, Woman in Front of Me in Line at Winco Last Night, was the watermelon moscato just an added bonus, a watermelon-grape medley on top of the apocalyptic sundae that is gawking at panic shoppers?
Or did you originally go there to buy toilet paper, just like the rest of us? Did you have responsible plans to stock up on canned food and antibacterial soap and Folger's coffee, a brand you would obviously never drink if we weren't in a literal state of emergency? And upon seeing that spot in the aisle where the toilet paper should have been, that gaping, empty chasm between the disposable napkins and the paper towels, wide and bare enough to be a black hole—when you saw that, did you decide, fuck it, grab the closest bottle of alcohol you could find, and book it to the check-out line?
Did you know the moscato you were buying was watermelon-flavored, Woman In Front of Me? Or did that not register until it was sliding down your gullet while you were crouched behind the bushes in the Winco parking lot? Do you drink flavored moscato often, or is it part of your life post-virus, the same way Purell-scorched dry hands are now a part of mine? Do you typically only drink natural Pinot Noirs from the Willamette Valley? Were you surprised at how much you savored the sickeningly sweet drink, if only because it was jolting enough to push the pandemic out of the edges of your mind for a few seconds?
Do you think everything is going to be okay, Woman? Do you think this will pass, and people won't be evicted, and they'll get their jobs back, and we'll manage somehow to not overwhelm our hospitals? Do you think scientists will find a vaccine, and that enough people will have access to it? Do you think the 2020 election will happen as planned? Do you think we'll get Medicare for All out of this? Or do you think we'll make a turn for even more hard-right authoritarianism?
I know it's unfair of me to ask you all these questions, as if you could answer them. It's just that I'm social distancing in my house right now, laptop open on my couch, and my mind won't stop wandering back to you. Earlier today I was on a media conference call with some top state officials, and one of them said, “Conversations that we have in the morning sometimes change radically in the afternoon," and that felt very true. My brain keeps ping-ponging from anxiety to anxiety, so I let it rest on that single bottle of watermelon moscato, sandwiched between panic portions of ramen and rice on the Winco check-out conveyer belt, and it calms down for a minute.
I hope you got a nice buzz off that moscato,
Blair
