I don’t like to buy magazines smiling at you and I at the grocery store, while we wait to pay. Although, I almost always seem to manage to suppress the need to pick one up, the headlines accompanying the distraught look of a celebrity mishap marriage or rehab gone wrong, tug at the archway of a collective unconscious. I am by no means alone in this endeavor. It is ten o’clock on a Friday night, an hour before Gelson’s in West Hollywood is about to close. I find myself holding a basket with overpriced goods because Trader Joes has already closed for the night, and am eyeing disaster in the from of large red font underlining someone else’s life. A celebrity I will most likely never know, someone who has no impact on my life, but today their life may be glamorized, and tomorrow we may be horrified by their acts of fallen grace. It becomes easy to mimic their look, and even easier to deconstruct them. We put them up on pedestals made of glass, shaken by what it takes to survive with the world’s third eye, condemning and glaring. I shift my ashamed gaze into my basket. The price of my Smart Water (a love affair I had to give up once I read the only reason we had managed to forge such a strong bond, was to be found in the synthesized sugar it contains) is of course, almost double than in any other store.

The milk is $6, and the oranges I bought for breakfast, are an even $4 a piece. I am a firm believer in doing my best to try to consume not out of the sheer mass created need for gluttony in America, but to maintain a healthy homeostasis within my body. A daily battle to keep additives, preservatives, and hormones at bay. The European Union will not import American produce because it will not meet their standards for what they would place in their grocery stores. When you have hungry mouths to feed, organic greens at three times the price of a Happy Meal may not be an option. Steadily, in accepted silence, we watch the prices of everything on the grocery lists begin an upward climb. Forty cents more for the bottle of Pellegrino, toilet paper is $2 dollars more per package, eggs almost $5 a carton. It all adds up in what could appear to be small increments until the total bill reminds you is was probably $50 less a few months ago. If we throw in a three dollar magazine to tell us what to eat, how to reach a faster and more pleasurable orgasm, and compare our own lives to those of fallen media stars, maybe things don’t look so bad. Perhaps the neighbor’s son is not really dying in Iraq, and the families he’s left displaced or dead don’t exist because we can’t trace their outlines on glossy pages. A new dark shade of purple is the color of the season, and teenage pop stars tell us how glorious it is to be young and free in America, and without a clue.