Senseless Attachments, Part 36
In Four Acts


1. Subway tuna-melt sandwiches.
Like I can’t go home and stir together some damn tuna salad and sprinkle some oil and vinegar and banana pickles and oregano over top and call it a freaking sandwich. Here’s the first thing, though. If you lived here and got amnesia but had remembered first to link “Subway” in your mind with “Beachtown,” you’d be saved; there’s one of those ugly little yellow awnings every third block.

And as I drive near one of the eight or twenty Subways boasted by every major thoroughfare, it’s the whole package deal I find myself longing for. It’s the sandwich itself, on that fake wheat bread, with chips and a root beer and that horrible lighting and that horrible booth with no padding. It’s smart in none of these ways: Nutrition, Money, Total Dining Experience.
But it’s my weird little habit and I must keep it.


2. Pringles
We all know that these are fake and reconstituted. That second word? “Reconstituted”? Is how my mother ends any conversation in which the P-word is brought up. “They’re reconstituted, for god’s sake!” with a roll of the eyes, toss of the arm, argument done.

Yeah, I know, Mom; you raised us on the best-ever homemade bread and wouldn’t buy Froot Loops and had us listen to Free to Be, You and Me, but I’m sorry. You couldn’t save us. Yesterday, when I stopped into the gas station for a huge bottle of water after going down to these salt marshes for a story I’m working on, it was ninety degrees. All my own salt was sweated away, a blotchy pattern on my green t-shirt.
Then I saw the can.
It had been maybe years since I’d last had Pringles. Although you wouldn’t buy them, you didn’t count on my best friend in elementary school. I’d get off at her bus stop, and she and I would measure entire afternoons with Doritos and Hohos and Pringles and entire sleeves of Girl Scout Samoas while we dressed and undressed our Barbies and had the little sugar-and-fat-fueled gals run away from home and rescue each other. Till it was time for supper at her house. When we’d order in pizza from Domino’s.

So yesterday, I buy the regular Pringles can, not the small “snack” size that’s one-quarter the height and ten cents cheaper because, you know, I’m a smart shopper. I get in the car and start snacking—no, munching—no; something more grotesque and gluttonous. And then I see I’ve eaten a quarter of the can and so I close the lid.

Fast forward to tonight, when my roommate gets home.

Fearfully, I approach her. “Did you eat some of those Pringles?”
She shakes her head nah.
“Oh, no, Carmelita. You—didn’t? Tell me you ate some! Tell me I didn’t do—this!!” (Alice tears off the plastic lid to reveal…four, maybe five, sad chips curled sideways and alone at the base of the Pringles silo.)
Oh, but I did. I did. I am powerless.


3. Frank Black’s Teenager of the Year
When will I tire of this record? I listened to it on the way to and from the salt marshes. O, “Calistan” and “Ole Mulholland”. “Fazer Eyes” is my favorite love song and “White Noisemaker” just rules and then, like two seconds later, it’s over. Oh, perfect rockitty-pop; I love you. I love you. I love you. I do.


4. My car.
Dear ghostcar may be dying. My mechanic can’t find the problem, but a car whose battery light flashes and then just dies mid-drive is not a well car. So tonight I dropped it elsewhere for a second opinion after not driving it for four days.

Your car becomes the main thing you come to count on without thinking about it if it’s been with you while other, more seemingly-solid things have come and gone.

But it’s old. A few years ago it started burning oil. Then the speedometer and odometer went. Great big tears have rent the upholstery for as long as I’ve had it, and it’s got its share of dents, too.
But it’s a good car. It’s always run well, and I love driving it. Love the way it shifts, its tiny size and vroomy pick-up.

I’m not one to get romantic over cars; I drive a Honda, for god’s sake.

Still, there’s not a major milestone since the end of college for which Ghostcar’s not been there. It was the first car I bought myself. It housed my first major, marathon, heart-wrenching breakup, which spanned a drive from Detroit to Atlanta. (Yeah.) My dog’s muddy, destructive jaunt from puppy- to adulthood. About a dozen moves. Spur-of-the-moment trips to Kentucky. I swear it knows the way to Pittsburgh.

Even with its busted front bumper. Even with its lack of a/c--I'll even take that, here, south of the Mason-Dixon. And the old stickers that will not peel off. I hope it sticks around a little longer.