Rehosting "How to Enjoy"
If I hear one more person use the phrase “in these times of corona-virus” I am going to kill myself
Jun 8, 2020
It’s cloudy today. We’ve had a very nice spring, yesterday the weather was wonderful. We have a lot of wonderful days; completely open, light blue sky, a gentle wind, so long as you’re in the sun it’s just barely warm enough to go topless, and you get a small little wicked thrill every time a small cloud or a gust of wind passes by, stiffening up your nipples, suddenly vulnerable, suddenly small, suddenly self aware. Oh God what am I doing. I’m a poser. It’s way too cold for this. Everyone else is still wearing winter clothes. What am I trying to prove.
But it’s cloudy today. Windy too. The line for the donut store is 50 people long, standing 2 meters apart in a long, long line down the street. The vast majority are in groups of two or three. Occasionally a mother with three or more children, the groups stand together in little enclaves. Approximately every tenth customer is just by him or herself. Usually her.
The store opens at around 12 every day. I’m not actually sure. Between 12 and 13. It’s 5 minutes to 13 as I write this, so presumably it’s earlier.
The line varies in length by day — some are slower than others — but only very slightly during the day. The average wait time is around 40 minutes — to enter. Then there’s the time you spend inside, making your delicious decisions about which cakes to buy.
The cakes are delivered by truck every morning, and made in a factory in the other end of the country. They are perfectly industrial, and not much more than a repackaging of sugar. No human hand has touched the dough before you pick it out of the bag when you get home.
The interior is in bright pastel colours. The employees wear a yellow uniform. The 5 men who ran the startup have hired two young girls to stand behind the counter. They wear plastic gloves and hair nets. The cakes are displayed behind a class case. The air smells like a mix between sugar and the sterility of a hospital. They play dance music on the radio.
The store opened around the start of the year. Before then, the little corner housed a small corner store, which didn’t actually have anything in store except cigarettes, and was really just a front for a little club house for a bunch of Asian fellows to sit around and socialise, and run a little bit of drugs. Cops used to sniff around a lot back then, thinking it was this big drug running scheme or whatever, and not primarily just a place to hang out. They of course drove out and delivered the drugs, and they of course didn’t keep the stuff in the store. But whatever. Before then, it had been a funeral service. Before then, a blockbuster video rental store.
Every single day since they opened for business, there has been people standing in line down the street, from 12 to 6 pm. This is out in the suburbs, along a major street out of town. Most of the customers arrive by car or by bike from the inner city, from the apartment complexes, from the student houses, from the chic hipster part of town that’s somehow comprised entirely of lofts. [REDACTED] has successfully become chic and hip, and they are raking it in.
Their secret?
It’s a dry factory produced base cake, which they then drop a bunch of random candy on top of. In layers. Think about the donut as basically an edible plate, perhaps, on which candy bars, gummy bears, and so on, are served. They don’t even do the confectionery thing or the hipster coffee store thing, where you draw little faces or figures or whatever. It’s just a bunch of shit all mashed together.
The neon sign above the entrance has a little Instagram and a little Facebook logo on it.
That’s the point of course. It’s very simple, there’s no big trick to it. You don’t go there for the cakes, you go there for the photo op. This is not something I think I’m clever for revealing to you. It is literally their business model. The owner is some minor reality show celebrity, I was told, when I voiced my displeasure and bewildered wonder at the phenomenon to someone. You go there to have the stardust rub off on you. Obviously. Everyone gets it. No one is being cheated. Everyone gets what they pay for — everyone gets what they deserve.
The point is not being a smart-ass and going “oh wow look all the cakes are the same, the illusion of choice in capitalism when actually it’s all the same blah blah blah blah.” The point is showing everyone else online that you did. Even smart-asses like you and I who are too good for this sort of thing, get exactly what we want.
Everyone gets what they want. So why does it bother me? Well, for two reasons. One, it’s too poetic. And two, people should not get what they want.
The idea of buying overpriced trash, literal flour that tastes like nothing, pumped with sugar to shock your senses into considering it pleasurable, is a perfect mirroring of the service that is actually being sold — it’s like poetry. They rhyme. The form aligns with the substance; the inner and outer is aligned. Only, it’s reversed — the “product” of the cake is the outer, and the “experience” of posting a selfie is the inner.
This format, if properly directed towards a noble end, is how you can create art. It’s how you can create stunning speech. It’s this alignment of the form with the subject matter that can make the viewer feel for a moment, that there is order and beauty to the universe. It’s one of the little crevices where you can peek through the horizon and catch a glimpse of God. But, you know, reversed. So you see the other thing.
Of course the people who frequent the establishment are not going there to watch art, or believe in god. They are going there to BE art. They are going there deliberately to dehumanise themselves. Everyone gets what they pay for. Everyone gets what they want.
The reason I’m so clever is not because I’m saying, “they don’t even go there because they want to eat the cakes!!”, but because I’m saying, they go there, because they want to be “eaten”. What is for sale is exactly the inverse of what is formally expressed.
It bothers me because it not only ugly, it is profoundly ugly. It is ugly in such an elaborate and elegant way, that it makes you believe that Satan is the prince of this world. The sin of indulgence in gluttony, which is really just a way to punish yourself, is compounded over and over again, fractionally, by increasing layers of complex mirroring of itself. What I see, when I look at the line of 50 people, wasting their time for 45 minutes, is not even people torturing themselves for no good reason. It’s people standing in line to torture themselves. That’s where we’re at — there’s not enough torture to go around. Supply cannot keep up with demand.
They don’t talk to each other. The couples talk amongst themselves, the groups talk amongst themselves, but they don’t talk to each other. It’s not a social event. They are wearing their best clothes though. I thought maybe I had something a while ago, when I started thinking about it as, maybe, some kind of substitution for going out to restaurants and cafes during the day, again, not to socialise with strangers or neighbours, but just to be “seen” — what a hundred years ago was promenading — as a reaction to not being allowed to go to restaurants and cafes. But that doesn’t actually work. Because in any real society, you would just go promenading — taking a leisurely walk around town. And that wouldn’t be dehumanising enough.
