Seasonal Affective Disorder

[Slightly infected by a wail at Cultural Parody Center]

± Mr. and Ms. F. transfer their shopping bags from their car to a trolley, close the boot, then proceed to walk backwards towards the shop with their children in tow. They wring out their handkerchiefs and dab tears that roll upwards into the ducts from whence they came. The bill states that they have what they wanted and have paid the correct amount, but what with them reversing into the shop, by the time their check-over reaches the top, they are anxious that neither is the case. The bill itemises nothing. The total is zero.

± So they thank the cashier, their card is duly refunded, and Ms. F. keys in the PIN. The shopping works its way from the bags in the trolley to the conveyor belt and, finally, back into the trolley minus the bags. This procedure is helped along by the fact that the shopping is minus any shopping. Everybody pretends they are handling products, when in fact, they gesture emptily in the air. They mime what they imagine they do not have any longer.

± They back away from the checkout, and when they scan the checkouts for one to join while reversing away from them all, they find they are among other pallbearers in a wake for no reason. They are heartened at all these neighbours they never knew they had, and resolve to get to know them in the New Year. What interesting lives these people must lead! Just look at how emptier their trolleys are by comparison! Have the F.s remembered to return absolutely everything? Are they profligates in denial? The policy of returning is clearly spreading. What?! This must be the end of the world! Hey - the end of the world could be a whole new world of impossibilities that opens up before them!

± Mr. and Ms. F. are jollied up. They stop at an island counter to celebrate with empty plastic cups. They nod for a bit, then tip back the cups and pretend to vomit fluids into them. They hand their regurgitations to the in-store demonstrator, who, thereupon, deftly tosses the desolate emptiness into a bottle. The F.s take time to converse briefly with the demonstrator in the pseudo-Swedish that their English sounds like when spoken backwards. "Shnear quard-quard-qaurdoower" they gutturally wail.

± Standing there now before the drink they pretended to have, they feel slightly sad. Perhaps it is these shorter, wintry days in the northern hemisphere? Perhaps they have just caught a virus? Perhaps they need leadership? They hang curiously around the small crowd that has gathered at the island counter. They weave and bob their heads to get a glimpse of what is afoot; but remember, they are walking backwards, so the counter suddenly disappears from view, and just as suddenly from mind, leaving them to begin the long task that has brought them here.

± Stacking shelves is the last job in the world that many people would consider: there is no hourly rate on this earth that would tempt them; and yet, the strange thing is that doing it in reverse is often a favourite pastime for those same people, and they pay for the privilege of doing it! The F.s, then, are an unusual bunch, in that their shopping trips involve returning their shopping, product by product, shelf by shelf. What’s stranger is that the products are non-existent and therefore have to be imagined.

± This demands an heroic effort of will. Decisions about what they imagine they have in their hands are the very substance through which they express themselves as individuals. The relations between what they imagine they have and what they imagine other people have spell out the connections at their disposal for deliberating on the kind of persons they imagine they can show themselves to be in relation others. Sometimes they compare the non-existent labels with each other. Sometimes they make decisions on a whim. Either way, as they walk backwards and pretend to put things on shelves, tough decisions to unmake decisions are decided, items on their shopping list are uncrossed, and the list anticipates its being unwritten. At this, the surveillance kicks in, backwards.

± Somewhere in the bowels of the store is a computer tracking their every unmade decision. These decisions, which will have been soon forgotten anyway, had they been taken, are now forgotten by the computer as each of them is unmade. The computer normally knows shoppers better than they do: with the F.s, the computer unknows. Megabytes of data about the F.s are unwritten, all knowledge about things to be forgotten forgotten. The computer has a virus, and as it empties itself, so too does the empty trolley, extending the memory lapse to all decisions about shopping, even those long since forgotten into habit.

± Shopping like this is painful. The F.s wail until an assistant appears with a mop and a cone. They return their shopping with an empty trolley, imagining what was in it, walking backwards among others like them in this dreamlike state until they exit the entrance to return the still empty trolley to its compatriots. A wave of optimism overcomes them. However, the days are short at this time of year. They wail again. The optimism will pass as surely as a virus.