“Hello! You found my shop of strange and wonderful things!”

Perhaps I’m just not familiar enough with the typical lyric content of the softrockscape, but I’m pretty sure whoever programmed the muzak for this pharmacy seriously had their heart fucking stomped on. Each is a bitter, self-loathing anti-love song, filled with either inner congratulation over kicking a lover out, or enthusiastic delusions about getting back with a girlfriend who’s been gone for five years. I mean, is this the subject matter that we as a culture have decided is vanilla-content? Everybody knows that muzak is there to not be noticed, to exist as an absence of silence, but through fulfilling this societal norm of finding poppy-yet-inoffensive music some weird artifact of perpetual heartache got picked up along the way. I mean, what response is this muzak-engineer trying to achieve here? Perhaps, “Thanks for making me relive all my failed relationships today, pharmacy. I just wanted some damn q-tips.” Additionally it’s fairly unsettling when, in the midst of unenthusiastically restocking tampons and grumbling to yourself about the malaise-inducing lovesick auditory mindfuck, a song comes on that you actually like. And you realize it fits in the all-too-specific mold perfectly.

Remember all those sweet middle school urban legends about what was really up with Seal’s face? I heard he had horrific night terrors and clawed at his eyes while he slept.

Exacerbating the unnecessary nostalgia of the pharmacy are the products themselves. Part of the magic of living in a consumer culture is getting product-based nostalgia in inappropriate settings. Especially the cheap shit, because the branding never gets updated. First it’s that can of hairspray that the one girl used to use. Just as I’ve convinced myself that Duncan Sheik‘s stupid lyrics were having no effect on me, I see it sitting on innocently on the bottom shelf there, and immediately I can taste it in the back of my mouth. It tastes like being late to a party, creaking open a shitty collegeland apartment bathroom door after a justification knock to find a fog of chemical hair fixative thick enough to haze my view of the mirror across the room, but in it is the reflection of a girl who looks so good that I realize I don’t even really care where we go tonight, and anyway there’s the rest of the bottle of Boone’s Farm to finish before I leave and what am I oh fuck right I was straightening Isle 10.

Each isle holds these hidden triggers of remembrance, and the boredom deprives me of any shield to their power. Hell, every time I go down the makeup isle I yearn for a time, now past, when I could get away with painting my nails without probably-job-ending social repercussions. Plus, kicking around this stupid step-stool is bringing back to life slumbering muscle memories from my grocery store job of 2002. It’s a near-perfect storm of connotation.

Having thusly ranted, I should mention that the pharmacy is the job where I actually feel like I fit in. The hardware store, on the other hand, is the straightest thing I’ve ever voluntarily been a part of. It’s a world of burly bros lifting things, heavily-makeuped girls flirt-cashiering, gritty workmen with empty stares setting nameless metal components on counters, and then me. And because my teensy pale frame and fabulously quaffed hair wasn’t quite ironic enough in this environment, fate decided to cram in a few more lulz for me and give this barren, ill-lit unadorned warehouse of a store an 80s synth-pop muzak station. I mean, when I think hardware store I think southern rock. But no. Instead, I find myself trudging my way through one of the most heternormative jobs imaginable, and I can honestly say I’ve never heard more Depeche Mode songs in a public setting past seeing them live. It’s fucking bizarre.