A Health and Beauty Aisle Fantasia

Sunday: for many people, a day of rest and reflection. For me, these concepts are not always the most congenial bedfellows. What to do with Sunday... as I lather my hands with a generous blob of "A La Maison" Rosemary Mint hand soap, it's clear to me I should go purchase more soap. I've got plenty, but a little stroll through Foods For Living's Health and Beauty Aisle couldn't hurt...

I love soap as much as music, and that's OK, but there was a time when I thought it wasn't. Nowadays, you'll often find me in FFL's Health and Beauty Aisle, inhaling lemongrass and lavender oil, masquerading as a well-adjusted person. I'm at peace with it. Let me explain.

Even in this digital age, I love looking at CDs (especially at local antiquated media stores like FBC). There is something fundamentally appealing about the way the titled spines fill the boxes in perfect uniformity while the print upon them is a wild spectrum of color and purpose. Unknown metal bands with their names in runic fonts somehow both austere and hokey. The more obscure the band, the wilder the proclamation, right down to the local acts with unutterable blasphemies screaming across their jewel cases.

            One part of the satisfaction I get from this perusal is the predictable pleasure of cultural tourism, sifting through this torrent of sound, both familiar and alien, with my fingertips. When it comes to shaving off the hours, to finding something a tune to whistle at the bus stop until that final number 13 comes droning out of the fog for me, CD browsing is fantastic. If asked why I enjoy it, I would reply—unreflectively—that I like music as both a sensual experience and as a cultural artifact, and so I like looking at it, picking it up, turning it over in my hands. I would say this while holding a hopefully unreflective jewel case in my hands, maybe (already) squinting at the fine print to see if someone interesting maybe played the panflute on Track 8.

A Socratically persistent person may ask if I were any more or less happy combing through the daunting array of available shampoos and essential oils in the Health and Beauty Aisle of Foods For Living. Of course, it would make me seem like a buffoon (or at least unemployed) to straight-up admit that I could easily be lost for the better part of an hour in the forest of handmade bar soap there, that I could be transported to regions antipodal to everyday experience, if only for a second, by smells lacking any natural analogue.

This hypothetical prosecutor of my secret self may note how nothing about my love of secondhand music perusal involves actually listening to the music.

For a long time I thought I had a pathological need to browse, with bouts of accompanying retail therapy. If something as respected and abstract as music could just as easily be replaced by a tray full of food-grade, local, organic essential oils (wink), was I not merely a simpleton with a need to cruise the shelves? Maybe. But I no longer think of it that way.

I love the shampoo shelf more than I could ever love a particular bottle of the stuff. And as much as I may love a particular album, it is ultimately not the Known—the treasured and Already Owned—that drives my compulsion to consume. The urge to stop and smell the rose-scented lotion surfaces anytime I am not engaged with something more pressing. The context changes, but the urge does not.

The immensity of life cannot be approached in any given moment. We dare not. The Bilderbergers, Higgs boson, Osiris, quanta, 14 billion eyes, the thousand lives one will never lead, who, thanks to fiction, you can still dive half inside and come out of face first and more terrified, the mortal reality of the life you dove into fiction to escape in the first place, refocused and more immediate than ever…but the shampoo gives one little pieces. LorAnn Oils can summon the mind to distant shores with a breath. Sandalwood can be a memory, or a half-memory and a puzzle. Knowing that such journeys wait inside each bottle, I can rarely stop before whiffing at least a dozen.

On the surface it’s easy to cast myself as a victim of consumer culture. It’s easy to imagine my infant body as an undiscovered island, the conquistadors of shiny new things planting flags of desire and fear in my young mind. Baby Me, all pudge and unbridled want, hears his first commercial on a hospital TV before his eyes ever open. Strangers in conference rooms are parsing and mapping Baby Me’s brain, so that when I am old enough to be “self-sufficient,” I can trade in my time for some money, and trade in the money for some goods and services, and these people can take my money and trade it in for some time of their own. It's a fine system. It’s easy to see these advertisers as vultures or puppet masters. A little too easy. I no longer see this as anyone's fault, or a fault at all.

I no longer feel my compulsion to consume is subtraction from some other, whole person who does not feel he needs to cheat death by delving into shampoo otherworlds and album cover art.

Good soap and delicate incense create miniature universes. They are portals into desert bazaars and hidden groves. Such vials of adventure keep us from grieving overmuch for the aforementioned unlived lives. The world suggested by a colloidal oatmeal exfoliating body scrub isn't a proxy, but a place I wanted to be all along. Holding basil mint soap in my hand while the world around me plods on is terraforming, planewalking, the ingestion of a utopia. And to imagine that 100 such places exist on the same shelf, a whim away from one another...