De Chardin’s Forklift

You walk into the enormous, bleakly lit mega-dome that is Costco, and you’re reminded of one thing; Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. He was the controversial Jesuit priest whose ideas about the Omega Point earned him a robust slapping around by the religious authorities of his day. A paleontologist and geologist by training, de Chardin fully embraced and exalted the theory of evolution. He saw it as a teleological progression toward ultimate complexity – a progression whose zenith would be a sort of cosmic consciousness, a oneness with God. He called this zenith – this coalescing of all history’s moments into a singularity of divine cognition – the Omega Point. To Vatican thinking of the day, he sounded like a showrunner for the Twilight Zone.

Walk into any Costco, though, and you can see in the enormous, hushed cathedral a touchingly mortal and workmanlike expression of de Chardin’s intuition. Look around. Look at the size of the place. Look at the size of the mayonnaise tubs. Who needs that much mayo? The Donner Expedition, maybe. What are we reaching for? Is this stupendous bubble of architecture and product somehow allied to our aspirations as a race? Its mad expansiveness signals how utterly immersed we are in the metastatic growth of our perceived needs. “You need this!” All right, already! Give me parking and a forklift and let’s go shopping. 

Paragon of Animals

Costco is a grocery store approximately as large as the African savanna we used to sprint across, both in pursuit of dinner and in full flight from becoming dinner. Where once we partook of Darwinian torments just to survive, today we gather like bobbing little sandpipers around Costco’s snack stations, jostling and straining for a look, impatiently awaiting our dollop of coleslaw in its tiny crenellated paper cup. This doesn’t have to suggest we are a fallen species, but majesty in those instances does keep a polite distance. The blanched light of the sun timidly brightens the sales floor through rectangular fiberglass apertures set here and there in the distant ceiling, the Old Dear’s blinding nuclear fire dimmed to a homely 72% and evenly distributed over the shoppers below. The Goleta Costco’s proximity to Santa Barbara Airport means that every so often a huge bird-shaped shadow, predatory and fleeting, will pass the skylights and track hugely across the several acres of merchandise, shoppers hunching shoulders and looking briefly upward in a cellular-memory survival reflex. Okay, all clear. Is there any more slaw?

Rage Clicking

Look here. We live in an Age where the term “rage clicking” exists, and completely outside the purview of irony. The AI-suffused internet and our in-built modernist distraction conspire to diminish us apace. Some days you can almost feel the vertiginous free fall. The once-celebrated Information Age continues to outclass the Atomic Age in irreversible destructive force and the worldwide noose continues to tighten around the culture’s enthusiastically proffered neck. To convince us to abjure our screens, leave the house, and walk their puny aisles of merely comprehensible merchandise, “Brick and mortar” stores (for one thing) must morph outlandishly. Thus Costco – a shopping experience so insane it amounts to a kind of rebuke. Of what? We marvel at the comparatively limited selection of lawn furniture and free-range buffalo patties, and wonder what the world is coming to when a place this size offers only one brand of hypersonic gum-massager.

Surely Costco is the last gasp and final expression of a consumer experience you enter through an actual door. Seeing this pending demise of “grocery shopping,” the Costco Board has decided, it seems, to map the Costco visit to the expansive chaos of a human life arc, the better to finally conflate in our collective wastrel memory Shopping and Being. Once you’ve parked and hiked with some effort to the Warehouse, you are vetted by the vigilant gatekeeper, in whose presence you nonchalantly flash your Costco member card like a Pentagon habitue. Now you enter the Cathedral with a Lewis Carroll shopping cart the size of a Hyundai, there to face down an immediate field of dozens of HD televisions, all of them tuned to the same closeup of an intensely hi-def, vibrantly colored little crab with its disgusting mouth parts and comical eyestalks. It just sits there, this lipstick-colored crab; but it sits there in such thrillingly granular high-definition you are enchanted. Is this what surrounds us beyond our imprisoning walls? Is life itself available in these hues and in this much mesmerizing detail? Your troubled mind flashes momentarily on the actual out-of-doors, with its disappointing deficit of pixels and habit of being presentationally oblique when all you want is to sit before it and stare from a seated position. The truth is, you will not recover from the hyper-detailed crab, very generally speaking. The out-of-doors impulse passes and you heave-to with your Gigantor cart and head into the Wilderness of Things. 

Above and Beyond

Three hours later you are stocked up on items of every description, and a few beyond description. You join the Ellis Island-like Costco Checkout Masses, a stream of humanity you’ve seen before in nobler settings. Each weary shopper is the heraldic, momentary termination of a bloodline, a wavering scarlet thread extending forward from the depths of a turbulent past so geologically and temporally remote it can’t be apprehended. At the nether end of the thread, your single unsung proto-human antecedent hadn’t the means to conceive of you here in Aisle 4. 

Above and beyond the cavernous Costco ceiling, the planets of our homely system – barren cratered rocks and gas balls bereft of even microbial automata – circle our sun like weary dance marathon contestants. We reach, we reach – and our reaching is poignant. We’re made of reaching! We want to be sated, comforted, embraced, understood. Why not? We want love and a dab of bargain coleslaw in a little paper cup. Why not? 

Lucky You

Many many many astronomical units away, our deep space probe has timidly entered the interstellar gulf, a tourist with his toe in the shallows. This machine, built once upon a time in a cleanroom by men and women in brilliant white bunny suits and non-woven polypropylene surgical masks, will chug-chug-chug like an inertial tortoise at 12 miles a second, free of friction and decay, to the very end of time. In those unthinkable precincts, seen and unseen stars throw their fire and their mystery rays and their primordial whatnot with abandon. What is out there in the unimaginably distant vacuum, this void beyond imagination? Is G*d out there? 

Or does the vast gulf of spacetime reveal a cosmic pattern that simply repeats itself ad infinitum – the herringbone motif that captures you when serial vodka martinis find you in a wingback chair staring at your wool trousers, bedazzled. From Planck Length to edge of the universe we are literally surrounded by and constructed of gooey, starlit wonder; some of it mineral, some of it cellular, all of it batsh*t crazy if only we took the time to apprehend that. [Yeah, maybe it was a mistake to order your martini with olives on the side, but whatever gets you to the numinous, broseph.] Back here on Earth we articulate our shared wonder by blowing up cities, timidly falling in love at recess, and surreptitiously scraping a groove into the icing on Aunt Carla’s visibly lopsided birthday cake. Yum. We mean well, most of us. That’s a solid bottom line. Meanwhile – Costco. 

You get to your car and while loading your purchases you note with sorrow there is a hole in your 14 lb box of gluten-free flapjack mix. Your eyes follow the trail of beige powder all the way back to the hot dog and pizza plaza, where it disappears in the congress of human footwork. Discouragement hovers briefly, a suspended wet blanket. You slowly unclench and wave it away. It’s all of a piece, you realize. A little cloud occludes the sun and a couple of performative butterflies flirt their way around a parking lot bulb-out in whose sad clump of crape myrtle is nestled a filthy paper cup. Across the way someone is passionately berating their kid. You’re surprised to find your face flushing with something like gratitude, and now you’re inexplicably tearing up. Here comes the shadow of a grin. What the hell is this?!