The Grocery Store

Part 2: "That’s how I know you’re not from the city.”

This is part two of my “THE” series. Read part one about “THE HARDWARE STORE.”

For some reason, I was inordinately excited to go to the grocery store. We needed ordinary provisions—eggs, oat milk, butter—as well as ingredients for the dinners I had mapped out—cheeseburgers, cauliflower shawarma, cacio e pepe.

I go to the market multiple times a week for this or that, but this particular trip swelled with literary potential, which is no doubt due to the fact that I am reading Knausgaard again. I’m on book three now and it took 139 pages for me to even consider picking up my pen to underline something of particular interest: “Speed and anger went hand in hand.”

What inspires me about Knausgaard isn’t the writing itself—his sentences are largely unremarkable—but rather his relentless documentation of everyday life—cooking dinner, getting ready for work/school, etc. This way of being infused my powers of observation with a new vigor, and elevated observation itself into a kind of meditative state.

What’s more, his manner of writing soothed me, which is something I sorely needed after my bear attack book in which the author’s body becomes a Cold War battleground for French surgeons who distrust their Russian counterparts. My experience of reading Knausgaard was like literary ASMR—soothing, quiet, private, with a premium placed on minute attention to detail.

I was also excited to go to the grocery store because I decided to get myself a treat. I have been so regimented lately, devoting every moment to reading or writing or lifting weights, or at least aspiring to. Whenever I started to nod off while reading late at night, I’d get up off the couch or out of bed and do twenty push ups to wake myself up. The exertion, however, often only served to further fatigue me, sandbagging my body closer to sleep.

Despite all my focus, I haven’t managed to finish a single book or write a single essay. I have read more than a thousand pages—plowing 275 pages deep into medieval history, 297 pages into a biography of Edgar J. Hoover, 249 pages into Knausgaard, 323 pages into Lonesome Dove, 240 pages into Loorie Moore’s collected short stories. I have filled a quarter of my notebook with thoughts, events, laments, and I have written lengthy introductions to three potential essays. But all of this remained pointedly unfinished. At the end of the day I felt I had little to show for my monastic discipline and was beginning to wonder what the point was.

Anyway, the prospect of a treat, and the feeling that I deserved one, put a new wind in my sails. A can of La Colombe double espresso seemed in order. Perhaps some spicy sausages as well so I could attempt again to recreate Frankie’s heaven-heavy cavatelli dish. I missed those hot, oily coins burnt to a gristle.

Cooking meat, which I seldom do, has always struck me as a form of alchemy. How is it that fire alone can transform something that could sicken you into a delectable morsel? After taking off the last few months of 2025, I was back in the kitchen cooking many of our meals, in part to free C up to focus on her own projects, and in part because it’s what’s fair. It may also be because I’ve been spending so much time alone consumed with worry about nearly everything: the car with its many mysterious noises, unpaid tickets, and mountain of snow pinning it in; old patterns with old friends; travel arrangements for my cousin’s wedding in Colombia. And those were just my selfish concerns. Minneapolis. Iran. Venezuela. Greenland. The world was unraveling, and the United States was responsible. The global order we built, oversaw, and benefited from was now the target of one man’s crusade to “strike a deal” not realizing how good we already had it. Grasping the full magnitude of what was unfolding was hard to do. What felt like a slow creep of fascism was likely never slow at all, I just wasn’t looking closely. It was easier to look away than to bear witness. The news was frightening, and often left me feeling utterly powerless when resilience was what was needed, and speechless when language was my homeland. All I could manage were names of places under siege and people executed, and the federal agencies responsible for the terror and death. I called my senators, went to protests, followed the news, but it wasn’t enough.

It was well after dark by the time I set out for the grocery store, but it was necessary that I went today because tomorrow was a general strike and C and I had pledged to abstain from shopping, call out of work, and go to a protest. There were only a handful of shoppers so I lingered longer than I would’ve normally: took my time selecting produce, compared expiration dates on dairy products, surmised whether pecorino and romano were interchangeable. I also paused in the NA section, where my eyes flitted between two phony negronis; a white one and a classic-looking one that had “mezcal” in the title for some reason. They were bottled in a handsome cone-shaped glass that looked like a party hat and was heavy like a grenade. I added the white negroni to my basket already heavy with oat milk, potatoes, eggs, and went to look for sausages.

I’d never gone to the meat section of this store before. I scanned the pre-packaged goods, taking care to avoid eye contact with the butcher behind the glass in his signature white smock. Ordering meat from the counter made me nervous. I didn’t know what to say—what cut, how much—or how to say it. There was a method to ordering and you either knew it or you didn’t. You could tell whether someone has really lived in New York based on how they order at the deli, and you can tell what part of the city they came from if they said ketchup, salt, pepper or salt, pepper, ketchup. (While editing this, C paused here to fact-check me: “No one says ketchup, salt, pepper.” I do, I protested. “And that’s how I know you’re not from the city.”)

I didn’t see any spicy sausages in the case but I did see bratwurst from a local German shop I once visited on the Upper East Side after going to a reading of Devin Kelly’s for his debut novel. I’d arrived alone with Elena Ferrante in my hand five minutes late, but still in time to grab a seat. Bud Smith was on stage giving a laid back introduction to Devin. I knew Bud from a fiction workshop he organized a few years back and, afterwards, I went up to say hello to him and Mike, who I met through Bud’s workshop and now represented Devin among other writers in the city, several of whom had a penchant for self-mythologizing. These writers wrote about each other, commissioned each other, smoked and drank with each other.

Showing up that day I had hoped to kindle something with these writers. Often when I attended a reading of someone I admired it amounted to excessive lingering and nervously peeling the label off my second beer then immediately turning for the door after my last gulp. This time it worked, sort of, and I left feeling accomplished and hungry. To celebrate, I went to a German food shop Robert Sietsema (NYC’s best food critic) had recommended and ordered a bratwurst from a small counter adjacent to the store. I almost ordered a Bitburger as well, but decided against it. It was a long ride home on the subway, after all. As I waited with Ferrante open before me, another man showed up and sat next to me. He too ordered a bratwurst. Then he shrugged and said, You know what, I’ll take a beer as well. The girl poured the wheat-colored beer into a plastic cup and handed it to the man who already had his phone out and was queuing up a video. The young girl handed me a boiled sausage whose gray pallor looked entirely unappealing but still tasted good with mustard and sauerkraut. I was done eating within two minutes, gathered my things and went into the shop next door. Everything was imported—the chocolates, cookies, relishes, pickles. I took a lap, stealing a glance at the splendor in the deli glass when I could, before returning to the bank of pre-packaged meats where I selected a cheddar-stuffed bratwurst for myself and Irish bangers to give to Declan next time I saw him.

I once more reached for these cheese-stuffed bratwurst back in our neighborhood grocery, not in celebration this time but in consolation for my missing spicy sausages. Then I made my way toward checkout, resisting Quadratini since we still had some at home along with a diabolical bread pudding that Celina made.

By then, my podcast about Bari Weiss’ takeover of CBS had finished and I listened to the cashier’s gossip about their coworker’s dating life in a flirting way. I walked home in silence. Scarcely a soul was out. I didn’t feel cold for the first time in a while despite the freezing temperatures.