Go to Kentucky, underwear, lemon
Bill Keaggy collects found grocery lists and exhibits them at his site. As a recent New York Times article on his grocery list collection explains, entire personalities can be pieced together (or not) from these found documents:
”Some people pass judgment on the things they buy,” Keaggy says. At the end of one list, the shopper wrote ”Bud Light” and then ”good beer.” Another scribbled ”good loaf of white bread.” Some pass judgment on themselves, like the shopper who wrote ”read, stay home or go somewhere, I act like my mom, go to Kentucky, underwear, lemon.”
(I find myself unaccountably cheered by imagining the person who wrote the last list. The sequence "I act like my mom, go to Kentucky, underwear, lemon" is weirdly poetic, somehow. There’s also something fascinating about the way people categorize their grocery purchases, e.g. "milk, cereal, food, parmesan.")
He also collects pre-owned bookmarks, random junk from the street, unspectacular doorways, and rocks shaped like shoes. It’s odd: I lack the collector trait myself (well, except for a few specialized oddments like old postcards with scenes of cities at night), but I have always been rather envious of people who collect things, even though I know that if I were to collect things in any great number, I would have been buried under an avalanche of junk many years ago.
In Follow Me, if I remember correctly, Baudrillard talked about following people around, doing exactly what they do, and I think it included grocery shopping…
No wait, wasn’t there a Talking Heads (or David Byrne) song about following someone in the grocery store and buying everything they buy…
Or was that Laurie Anderson??????
AHHHHHHH
Sure you’re not thinking of Allen Ginsberg’s “A Supermarket in California”?