Monument to Ritual via TV Dinners

I hope I am setting this up appropriately for you to enjoy the splendid moment. The narrator in Robert Glück's "Everyman" anthologized in Men on Men 4 receives from the widow of a neighbour a stack of frozen dinners which were destined for the now deceased neighbour. They sit as a stack in the narrator's freezer for a while. Until ...

Every night the monument turned into a ritual by entering my body. I consumed his distinctions where before I had seen none, just an unknown expanse of bright utopian images to appeal to the stranger passing the frozen food compartment. To make wild assertions: to say I prefer Stouffer's Pizza Chips to Birdseye's Pizza Wraps. To eat Mac's food which was anyone's food — a generic confrontation with salt, oil, too sweet, pumped up with flavor, empty and exciting, a little sensational. I was not anguished. Perhaps I ate his food with greater awareness of the moment, a curiosity that floated on the moment, an expectation that deepened the silence (I say silence although the TV was on, was on, was on). In that way I mourned for Mac.

This is a tour de force mixing the commercialism of brand names with personal anecdote. It could be anyone. Everyone. Yet it is no one. They are gone.

And so for day 996
04.09.2009