Eat Your Progress

By Jamie Kornegay

“My mind is a hot, sopping biscuit. Got time for a nibble?”

— Grover Cocktail

As the sun loses weight and sinks behind the horizon, the dozers rove and trample like mechanical rhinoceroses, their silhouettes assuming a fantastic life that the detail of daylight-reality cannot fool us into believing. Here in the first dark, their cooperation is evident, their scouring more passionate. Under the cover of darkness, they’re paving the way for a better, more user-friendly future. We cannot see what they’re doing, though one imagines them rooting through the dust of our forefathers’s good fortune, hauling all the yesterdays away to the smoldering fire piles that fuel the night’s waste. It’s a round-the-clock barbecue, and by the next morning, you hardly even remember what that tract of land looked like before it was mowed and leveled. That may have been kudzu once, there burned and piled on what will soon be a steaming chemical parking lot, flung to the side like a dollop of last week’s collard greens.

By the next time you take the exit off Highway 7 into Oxford proper, a handsome new Kroger building will have been erected next door to the existing Kroger, with only an overpass slinging shoppers between them. Such prompt and dependable service — we’d expect nothing less from that wonderful proletariat marketplace, where the aisles spill over with delicacies from our nation’s corporate crops and factories, working overtime to feed our bottomless bellies. In this great grocery nation the only breadlines are conveyor belts, transporting pillowy loaves to robots and minimum wage workers, who slather them with honey and nuts; carnivore portions are doled out in royal slabs, then Saran Wrapped so the flies can’t make dung nests; diet meals come in ready-made packages, heat and eat and never starve or puke.

“Where’s the mousse?”

“Chocolate or hair? We have both!”

Rows upon endless rows of shiny aluminum cans, cocked and loaded with volatile, sizzling sugar beverage. A freezer-burned harvest of mite-free fruits and vegetables, or whipped toppings and ready-to-thaw pastries. Eat your whole breakfast off a corndog stick or drink gumbo straight out of the microwave. Eat and run to the next meal before it gets cold again.

The express lane is open for anyone who can’t wait to pay and devour their purchases immediately. If you’re stuck among the inconvenienced, please meet the bare-breasted vixens from Paris, or hear Nostradamus’s last-minute Millennium forecast: “Fifty percent chance of hell and damnation!” While the barcodes are burning in front of you, get your gum, batteries and Y2K kits before there’s no turning back. This inconvenience is only temporary. When the SuperKroger opens, you’ll scan your own groceries and pay with credit, unattended. Is this a new level of trust? Don’t bet on it. And please don’t look directly into the scanning laser. Thank you for shopping.

If we’re approaching the goal of a grocery on every corner, like quick stops or light poles, then I’d say we’ve just about done it. And now the grocery stores will be updated in the millennium to super groceries, with the exception of Super James (make way for Trump Towers Oxford) and Super Big Star, or Quasar. They’ll pile the groceries on quicker than you can eat ’em, and only your generous dollars will help to clear the path for Phase II, the east-end suburban acclimatization project in one of Mississippi’s most-loved endangered historical sites, whereby the entire stretch of University Avenue to Highway 7 becomes a neon strip of temporary fixations. Why else clear another gaping swath through our (apparently) over-vegetated hometown, putting up something ever-more clever, convenient and better? What’s one more super grocery when we could have fifty — interspersed throughout the city, connected by a vital web of fast food chains, faster food chains, super gas pains and city blocks worth of storage facilities to hold all the leftover food we can’t eat ... food no one else can have.

We’re so hungry for more, we feed our ennui like a cold. The more distractions we throw up around us, the more we’ll run through it like a hall of mirrors. And the hungrier we get, the fatter and more average, until we wake up and the food is eating us.

It’s time we had an old-fashioned hunger strike. These visions of prosperity don’t look the same in cold wax paper as they once did, on the television, all juicy and divine. Sad to see it’s becoming an express lane world, one big convenient drive thru.

Well I say they can have their slake ... and eat it too.