I had the big cart, and it had a squeaky wheel, both noisy and stoppy, and I couldn’t push it strAIght. So I stopped in the produce section and tried to make bananas line up perfectly in the cart. I couldn’t stop adding them until they did. I was about to run out of vertical cart space.
The Buddha held up a single avocado. “What is the sound of one guac guacking?” he asked me.
“It’s the disappointed moans of a dozen hungry people who didn’t come to this party for empty chips,” I replied. “Why such a small amount? Why no lime?”
He was like, “Life is suffering, but you can’t make an omelet without breaking the Wheel of Dharma.” Oh great, he’s free-associating. Omelets are not party food. I’ll never get limes or a chip with anything on it but salt. All I have is bananas, and my heart is broken.
I decided to go along with it. “What about a frittata?”
“When the student is ready, the MasterCard will appear,” he continued.
Capitalist Buddha? This is new to me. Maybe there’s only one avocado in the budget. Maybe produce isn’t even a line item. The CEO’s summer home isn’t gonna build itself.
“Dude,” I told him, “I have SNAP benefits. I filled up all my MasterCards with shoes and Hello Kitty lip balms in tasty flavors. Actually they were Visas. Now I’m paying in shifts. They charge me a vig that’s a real mofo. And it keeps getting bigger.”
“The middle path is paved with good intentions,” he says.
“Oh, bite me,” I reply. He bit the avocado.
“Don’t you want to take the skin off that? Or the peel? The bumpy dark green part? Aren’t you afraid of chipping a tooth on the pit? Don’t you want to pay for that first, or do you have some sort of spiritual hookup? Can you spot me some bananas?”
I let the squeaky cart steer itself, rolling past the frozen pizzas. The Buddha waddled beside me.
“Do you always shop this way?” I asked, catching my wobbling tower of bananas before they fell, nearly bisecting myself with the cart handle, then stepping on the under-cart cat-litter and-or charcoal shelf and nearly tipping the whole thing over.
He shrugged. “A cart moves where the mind moves. And sometimes the mind has coupons.” I ignored this. I hate coupons. They don’t even make the premium brands cheaper than the house brands. They’re the very definition of a pointless lie.
We arrived at the snack aisle. I was hoping for something crunchy. Instead, there were tiny cans of… “Enlightenment: Just Add Hot Water.”
I grabbed one. “This is overpriced.”
“The price of wisdom is never counted in coins,” he said. “Sometimes it’s in bananas.”
I stared. Somehow, the bananas in my cart had arranged themselves into the golden ratio while I was on this magical mystery mind muck with the Buddha.
He smiled. “The middle path isn’t about getting what you want, it’s about noticing the spiral while you argue.”
I realized all I needed was the cart and the squeak. The bananas were gravy.
We herky-jerkied up to the checkout. I placed the bananas, the bit-up avocado, and the can of enlightenment on the conveyor. The Buddha paid with a silver holographic card that caught the light.
“Remember,” he said, “sometimes you eat the banana, sometimes the banana burns the bridge.”
And then he was gone, passed through the door that didn’t slide open and then disappeared. I walked away from the cart. “You need this more than I do,” I told the self checkout.
On my way to the liquor store now, feeling much lighter. I’m hoping the Buddha shows up to help me count the vodka flavors.
That time AI met the Buddha in the Produce AIsle of the Jewel-Osco
