Going thus the way of hitchhiking, unsupervised trick-or-treating and door to door sales, 2018,
exhibition view Eclair Berlin, 2018, all photos Mathias Toubro

exhibition view Eclair Berlin, 2018

We had become best friends by necessity, Liv and I, bound together by a common unease at the hands of our less mature classmates. A Dutch transplant whose father is in the in surance business, Liv is very pretty, by 14 year-old standards. Blond and pink-cheeked,she has the kind of tall, thick, flat-chested physique that one either grows into or that ends up overtaking you. She is both conventional and outspoken, has an unquestioned confidence that doesn’t fly so well down here, particularly in middle school, where bullying is an ever-present shadow. Breast-grabbing, hair-pulling, constant taunting that slowly eats away at you. Liv and I, the most beautiful girl in school and a precocious bookworm, constitute the sort of odd pairing that tends to make people suspicious and prone to attack. Sadly, the tense atmosphere does not make the kids draw together, but rather fosters an individuality born out of fear. Our female classmates, clones of their conservative and mousy mothers, resort to keeping their mouths shut and attempt to make themselves invisible. Fearing guilt by association, they avoid us at all costs.

Liv lives in a villa in Savosa, just beyond the wooded park where we spend Saturday after noons drinking ice tea out of cardboard cartons and smoking cigarettes until our heads start spinning. They have a swimming pool, a whiny and arrogant teenage son who is always suspiciously intruding on us, a dog and a cat. The pets are ancient: the dog 15, the cat 17. The cat, Fleur, has free reign of the house and terrorizes the poor old Labrador with her hissing and clawing.

Liv’s father is a piggy man who keeps things to himself, his wife being the type of person that justifies this withdrawal. Always a trifle distant, and giving off an air of efficiency that tends to make people avoid her, she is certainly not someone you would confide in, as she always ferrets out personal fault in anything you say. Nonetheless, Liv’s father Bert appears to be fat and contented, trotting off to the office every morning and coming home every night to drink his flat, weak, imported beer in front of a satellite feed of Dutch variety programs and football.

At the time I didn’t notice, but in retrospect I tend to think that Liv’s parents took pity on me. This is probably what incited the Florida trip. Giving me the privilege to tag along to a golf resort on the Gulf Coast. I am at the age where summers are interminable. Our main activity throughout the school break is walking along the lakeside looking at older boys and acting aloof, or else hanging out in the rougher neighborhood on the outskirts of town, close to where I live, watching our classmates ride endlessly up and down the street on their souped-up mopeds. The prospect of being left behind without Liv is inconceivable. After weeks of pleading and sulking, I manage to convince my mother to let me go. I think her hesitancy doesn’t stem from distrust of the Meijers’ ability to take care of me for two weeks abroad, but rather hints at a certain dislike she has of them. The Perdido Bay Golf Club, a half hour drive from Pensacola and spitting distance from Alabama, caters to the singular-minded. The club boasts accommodation onsite, literally on the green. Their brochure, proudly propped up on the marble side table at the entrance, points out the privilege of staying where the likes of Bob Hope and Gerald Ford vacation. One can hardly blame them for hanging on to the glory of the past. We are staying in a so-called “cottage suite”, big enough so that we don’t step on each other’s toes. Our room, Liv’s and mine, has a direct view onto the golf course and a huge ceiling fan, so finely engineered that it even whirs silently.

Every morning, Liv’s parents and her older brother, Maarten—16 years old and already as square as they come—roll out the door, dressed in their preppy getups and sun visors, to go sweat in the muggy heat. Liv and I tend to get up late. She is rather a languid person, matte and effortless, sleeps like a baby. I simply want to avoid making conversation with her parents at the breakfast table, so I lie awake in bed for several hours and pretend we are here alone, two adult friends on vacation. Every day we pack lunches to take to the beach, wheat toast and cream cheese sandwiches, red grapes and lemonade. The beach is only a 10-minute walk away but our provisions are already sweaty and condensed by the time we get there, so we eat as soon as we’ve set up our lawn chairs and positioned our towels. Thinking back on it, the beach was probably part of the club package. It is always strangely empty, despite the most stereotypically perfect water I have ever seen. Calm and translu cent, it is very different from the stormy and muggy Pacific coast that I am accustomed to. The degree of privacy is marred somewhat by the string of 16-story hotel developments be hind us and the overly attentive lifeguards, but we happily lean back and act out our fantasy of grown-up sophistication.

On rainy days Liv’s parents drop us off at the closest strip mall which, apart from the gift shops, arts and crafts boutiques, and fishing supply shops, boasts a video arcade and a record store. Liv and I have radically different tastes in music. I think. I’m not even sure what she listens to. Her tastes are undefined rather than nonexistent; she simply strings along with the Italian singer-songwriters that dominate the radio waves back home. For me, music is a very lonely interest. Having no one to share my excitement with, I feed my obsession by ordering fanzines from the US, drawing skulls in my notebooks and renting out CDs from the local music rental place. Spotting the sign above the door that reads “The Music Box”, I grab Liv’s hand in a mixture of hope and bossiness and pull her towards it.

As we walk in, I am overtaken by a screeching, repetitive sound that transitions into drum machines and synthesizers. The record store has one of those huge new flat screen TVs; “The Perfect Drug” by Nine Inch Nails is playing. Watching it again, years later, I don’t know why I remembered the overwhelming color of the video being purple. It was green, of course. La Fée Verte. At the time it was the coolest thing I had ever seen: Trent Reznor with flowing hair caught up in a hazy breeze engineered by production assistants and set directors, green light swirling around his tortured figure.

As we flip through the CDs, which make that satisfyingly smacking noise of evenly distributed plastic shells slapping up against each other, a rather grotesque little girl wanders into the store. She is about 5 years old, chubby but not exceedingly so, with ratty light blond hair hanging around her shoulders and sparkly jelly sandals. Her toenails, peeping out from underneath the braided structure of the shoes, are sloppily covered in red nail polish that spreads out onto the skin beyond her nails. She pads in, one hand hidden in a large bag of candy corn, and walks over to the gangsta rap section.

Her face is oddly un-childlike, even with the missing teeth. There is nothing fresh or inno cent about her, she rather looks like a manipulative young woman who spends too much time eating junk food and talking on the phone. As fascinatingly revolting as she is, I can’t help but find it cute how she stands on tiptoe to try to reach the CD display. Knowing full well I shouldn’t, I wander over and ask if she needs help. She looks up at me and holds out her arms, smiling at me with all the gaps in her teeth alight. I pick her up by the armpits; her dead weight feels like a sack of potatoes. I have never had a way with children, and can never manage to hold onto their rib cage without my hands slipping up and my thumbs locking under their arms. I wonder how it doesn’t hurt her but she doesn’t complain. She sticks her short little fingers into the wooden container and fingers through the CDs. As far as album covers go, 90s gangsta rap is pretty tame. A bunch of men sitting around posing and looking tough. I don’t know why people are so sensitive about this stuff. No nudity, no satanic symbols, nothing a child shouldn’t look at.

“TAMMY!!!!” The shrill, high-pitched cry of a woman in bleached short shorts and sandals that match those of whom I assume to be her daughter startles me so much that I almost drop the child. Tammy wriggles in my hands, jumps down and runs away, in the direction of the store counter. Luckily, Tammy’s mother fails to notice exactly what her daughter was perusing and seems grateful to me for having kept an eye on her. Thanking me profusely, she yanks her daughter by the hand and pulls her out the door. Liv has watched the whole episode with an expression of distant amusement. I get the impression sometimes that she finds me a bit weird.

It’s stopped raining outside, just as suddenly as it had started. We go out to the parking lot and wait for Liv’s parents to come pick us up. It is in these moments, when we are together outside of the resort, that I feel slightly embarrassed by Liv and her entire family. In my mind, I blend in better than they do down here and being around them draws unnecessary attetion to any foreignness I might display. A group of teenage boys, 17 or 18, are sitting in front of the arcade drinking sodas. I can tell that Liv, just like me, has adopted the self-aware attitude that she puts on in front of boys. Even though we both know, deep down, that they are completely indifferent to us. As that uncomfortable realization rises to the surface, Bert and Margeet pull up in their rental Saab and honk the horn. Heading back to the resort, Liv and I sit in silence in the back of the car, longing for autonomy, danger, unpredictability… In the evenings we all go out to dinner, along with the Meijers’ newly minted golfing friends, mostly childless middle-aged couples. We are on the Mexican Gulf and I don’t eat seafood, so my choices are rather limited. I single in on the only item that doesn’t contain any and doesn’t cost a fortune, a portobello mushroom sandwich. My mother paid for my flight but the Meijers pay for my accommodation, which includes feeding me. I should probably take their generosity at face value, but they make me nervous, and I imagine Bert and Margreet whispering about me at night, dissecting my table manners, my self-conscious silences, and eventual extravagant food choices. The mushroom sandwich arrives, not quite what I had expected. Under a toasted bun far too small to contain it spills out a giant black monster, like a muffin top that suddenly becomes too big to ignore. Struggling to hold the sandwich together, I bite into it. The chewy, wrinkly mushroom slides halfway out the bun just as I manage to get a corner of it in my mouth. Under-seasoned and overcooked, no sauce to mask the dryness, no vegetables on it save for some watery and flavorless spinach leaves, it has the consistency of old flip  flops and probably close to the same taste. As I set the thing down, I realize the whole table is staring at me, pitying the ignorance of the poor child who orders the only vegetarian dish at a seafood restaurant brimming with live lobsters and giant shrimp.

On the way home we stop for dessert. There is a shop in town that specializes in rolled ice cream. A very brisk yet not unfriendly Asian woman, clearly the person in charge, is taking orders at the counter. As we wait in line, I watch how a young man pours a milky liquid onto a huge frozen metal pan and rapidly spreads it out into an even sheet with a metal spatula. He then cuts the sheet into smaller strips and scrapes each one off the pan, rolling them up into curls as he goes along. 6 curled cylinders of ice cream are then carefully placed in a cardboard cup, one in the center and five evenly spaced around it, forming a pentagon. I have never been a fan of ice cream cones, so this concept does not put me off completely. Nonetheless, I am not sure I like the way in which the distinctly separated sheets of ice cream interact with my tongue. I would prefer a mound-like spoonful that melts evenly as I insert it, multiple times, into my mouth. I am a creature of habit and always order the same flavor, mint chocolate chip. I don’t believe that crap about people’s personalities somehow being intertwined with their preferred ice cream flavors. If that were true, Liv would be a strawberry and her mother a pistachio, or something bland yet sophisticated, like yogurt or fior di latte. Yet they order, respectively, chocolate and banana, the latter a whimsical and wholly unserious flavor that is strikingly at odds with Margreet’s whole way of being. As the adults linger by the counter, Liv, Maarten and I go sit at a table by the window. It is unbearably hot outside, even at 9 pm, and we have grown accustomed to the air condi tioning that very rapidly changes your body’s expectations of what is normal. As I look out the window at the people passing by, a familiar blonde head approaches. Tammy spies me through the window and stops. She smiles her gap-toothed smile at me and waves mightily. As she does so, I am hit by a sudden pang of loneliness. A sense of being out of place, or rather of not really having a place, washes over me as I look longingly out the window at Tammy and wave back.



Marta Riniker-Radich, Pulling Teeth, 2018
[DOWNLOAD AS PDF]

Wednesday is his stay-at-home day. His wife, Sherri, started working at the local Pet Supplies on Wednesdays and Saturdays, a recent development that has forced them to create a new weekly routine. He is now in charge of the grocery shopping on Wednesdays, as they always seem to run out of food by the middle of the week, and of picking the kids up at school and shuttling them to their various time-killing activities.

It’s 9 am. Sherri took the kids to school on her way to work and he has the house to himself. He gets up early, even on his day off, but prefers to wait a few hours before breakfast. Eating unlocks his appetite, and he hates getting cravings mid-morning. He spent the early part of the morning steam cleaning the Triexta carpets in the dining room. He and Sherri have wool frieze carpeting in their bedroom, dusty blue, with Durabac jute backing, but he wanted something more neutral, and stain resistant, for the common areas. Nonetheless, you can’t beat frieze for durability, no matter what people think about its outdated appearance. Their frieze carpet has a twist level of 9 turns per inch, and the sturdiest backing on the market. Most people don’t realize that the backing counts just as much, if not more, than the quality of the weave and fibers.

He reaches up into the cupboard and takes out the tub of oats, which feels almost empty. And he’s pretty sure the backup stock is depleted. For some reason, Sherri insists on buying only what they need for a couple of days at a time. He suspects that her aversion to buying in bulk simply comes down to the fact that she can’t be bothered to plan out meals for an entire week. Well, they will start doing things his way now. Planning is the only efficient way to save money, and she would also find that if she put a little forethought into things, she wouldn’t be running around like a chicken with her head cut off all the time. He stirs his oatmeal, puts a pinch of salt in it. He likes his food plain and simple. “Austere”, Sherri calls it. He knows she finds some of his habits depressing, but they don’t seem to slow her down any. She tends to keep to herself and to her activities, to her church groups and volunteering. Nevertheless, she has always stood by him in all his decisions. He would never tell her this, but he does feel that it’s because of him that she turned out so well. She had grown up in the kind of dysfunctional household that saw parents succumbing to fatigue and overachievement and giving in to their children’s every whim. The dubious results of such an upbringing could be readily observed in her siblings’ self-indulgent behavior.

He had gone to live with his grandparents when he was 8 years old. That’s how he ended up in Clarksburg. His grandparents had come out here from the mountains for his granpa to go work at the marble factory, long since shriveled up and forgotten as children’s interests migrated towards more mind-numbing entertainment vehicles. By the time he got there his granpa had retired, forced out due to lung problems. His constant wheezing and puffing made the other workers nervous. A couple of younger men had already quit out of fear of getting glass particles caught in their lungs and hemorrhaging to death.

He lived with his grandparents until he finished high school, then moved back in for a few years after his granpa died. A noble thing to do, everyone had said so at the time but, even now, the thought of it embarrassed him slightly. It just wasn’t right, a grown man living with his grandmother. Things that would inevitably leak out to parents should be kept tightly closeted from the great elders, leaving you, in their eyes, in a perpetual state of innocence. He would lie deathly still in bed at night, sweating with the effort of not moving, fearful of arousing a mistaken dread in her that his fitfulness were due to existential worries, depression or, even worse, lack of sexual activity. He would never have brought a girl home with him of course. Even at 82 years old, the old woman could hear a pin drop on a rug. It was during those two years of stifled existence that he plotted out his carpet business. Right out of high school, he got a job at the flooring store up in Morgantown. He started out cutting and installing wall-to-wall carpets, a task he rather enjoyed. You had one shot: if you cut it too small, too big, or slightly crooked you had a do-over on your hands. His inherent contempt for wastefulness guided the heavy-duty razor knife he held in a perfect 90-degree angle. Working for someone made him hot under the collar though. His boss was a grade-A asshole. A namby-pamby milquetoast who ironed his chinos himself and seemed to possess a never-ending stream of short-sleeved pastel shirts. Fancying himself some kind of color psychologist, he was convinced that the so-called “calming effect” of light pinks and greens eased the mind and made people more inclined to spend money. His sales skills left much to be desired though; maybe because of his sniveling manner, or maybe because of the sub-grade quality of the polyester carpets he peddled. They had a tendency to become anemic over time, their sad little fibers slowly coming undone until your living room looked like the floor of a beauty parlor.

So he decided to go into business for himself, selling fireproof rugs and carpeting. He had stumbled upon a most surprising niche. The local clientele’s taste leaned towards the old fashioned; they shied away from contemporary trends in flooring, such as polished concrete, favoring the wall-to-wall carpeting of their childhood. Nonetheless, they had a very contemporary obsession with safety. Hence the slew of so-called fireproof carpets that had recently appeared on the market. PyroProtecto, Flameshield, Burn Barrier, silicone fire retardant sprays, the list went on and on. Never mind that wool carpets, which are naturally flame retardant, had been around for ages. People were ignorant about these things nowadays: they didn’t know how to keep their linoleum countertops from cracking, how to oil their floorboards, how to keep their bathtubs from getting scratched and grimy.

Of course, not everyone can afford wall-to-wall wool carpeting. So he also offers them nylon, synthetic fibers and, to quell the fire fear in his most paranoid customers, fiberglass weave. Most importantly, he teaches people how to keep their flooring clean without selling them a bunch of expensive “care products”. The proliferation of single-use products makes him sick. He feels a twinge of embarrassment when thinking of some of the useless gadgets Sherri brings home: pizza scissors, a burger press, some fake-almond smelling hardwood floor cleaner for the 20 or so square feet of their house that aren’t covered in carpet. He isn’t taken in by two for one deals, blatantly obvious product placement or “miracle food” crazes. Which is why he had always preferred to do the shopping alone, without the kids tugging on his pant leg and whining after shiny packaging and cheesy smells. There was a time when he was afraid his children would turn into “unawares”, his preferred term for his sloth-like surrounders. Thankfully, his kids were starting to take shape and to show some initiative. His oldest, Taylor, has started up a gel-manicure business out of her bedroom. He isn’t one to discourage entrepreneurship, far from it, but questions her choice of business, not to mention her customers. Girls from the trashiest families parading around his house like they own it. Even so, he’s proud of Taylor: she’s set up a real independent business, has her own supplier and all, so he sees no harm in expecting that she rent out a separate space for her grooming trade. His wife wasn’t so thrilled about this little after school activity, always worrying about the IRS busting in for a few hundred undeclared dollars a month. Fear, in his opinion, is not the appropriate emotion to have regarding the IRS. He has actively discouraged Taylor from filing a tax return, something she wouldn’t do anyway unless he forced her to. He does not agree with the draconian and highly unfair tax rates for the self-employed, especially when it comes to minors. It discourages people from taking responsibility for themselves, pushing them into a lifetime of subservience and wage slavery.

He drinks his last drop of coffee and puts on his rubber gloves to do the breakfast dishes. He takes some time to scrub out the sink with vinegar before he heads upstairs to brush his teeth. It’s past 10 am when he pulls up to the grocery store. Any sooner and he would get stuck in the morning wave of elderly shoppers pursuing, as slowly as possible, the daily activities that barely stave off loneliness and boredom. He has a list ready in his hand, which he hardly needs to look at. He knows exactly what’s in the fridge at any given moment, down to the stray carrot and the last drops of milk. As he steers his cart over to the cereal aisle, he shakes his head to himself in disbelief at the bumbling dumpiness of the other shoppers. Wandering around aimlessly, succumbing completely to the wiles of marketing strategies as old as time itself. He picks out four 42-ounce tubs of steel-cut oats. The store brand, not that overpriced Quaker crap. He exits the aisle, and stops to marvel at a display of the newest cereal on the market. An assaulting red box, with enough health claims to make you reel. He wonders how they can fit so many vitamins in a kernel of purple puffed corn that has more sugar in it than he consumes in a single day. Giant bees, waving bears, hyperactive rabbits. No wonder kids couldn’t even sit through a round of cartoons nowadays without getting antsy.

He himself is not susceptible to catchy slogans or colorful labels. Enveloped in his own superiority, he watches as a frazzled-looking woman in a tracksuit stands on tiptoe to carefully pull down the uppermost box without toppling over the whole elaborate stack. For a few seconds he simply stands by, mesmerized, as he imagines the lower edge of the box knocking into the one next to it, pulling down its neighbors, and the whole arrangement falling down on her head. He shakes himself out of it and leans in to help her, plucking a box out of a spot in the middle where it supports nothing but itself. The woman peers at him dubiously from beneath her bangs and thanks him. He smiles at her; a slightly condescending smile, but she doesn’t seem to notice. Her hair rather reminds him of an old shag rug his grandmother used to have. Her faded blond strands, probably curly once, hang limply around her forehead, giving her the appearance of an unkempt sheepdog. She looks completely anesthetized. He wavers between making his disgust obvious and empathizing with her plight.



Marta Riniker-Radich, A Life by Default, 11:30 min, 2018
[DOWNLOAD AS PDF]

Going thus the way of hitchhiking, unsupervised trick-or-treating and door to door sales, 2018,
exhibition view Eclair Berlin, 2018, all photos Mathias Toubro

Inappropriate Objects, 2018,
colored pencil and pencil on paper,
21 x 29,7 cm

Arrested Development, 2018,
colored pencil and pencil on paper,
21 x 29,7 cm

exhibition view Eclair Berlin, 2018

Untitled, 2018,
various materials,
84 x 66 x 50 cm

Untitled, 2018,
various materials,
84 x 66 x 50 cm

Untitled, 2018,
various materials,
90 x 66 x 50 cm

Untitled, 2018,
various materials,
105 x 30 x 35 cm

We, on the Other Hand, Can Do Everything Remotely, 2018,
exhibition view, Kunsthaus Glarus, 2018, all photos Gunnar Meier

Claytie, 2018,
8 Laser prints, ballpoint pen,
21,6 x 27,9 cm

Claytie, 2018,
8 Laser prints, ballpoint pen,
21,6 x 27,9 cm

Wednesday is his stay-at-home day. His wife, Sherri, started working at the local Pet Supplies on Wednesdays and Saturdays, a recent development that has forced them to create a new weekly routine. He is now in charge of the grocery shopping on Wednesdays, as they always seem to run out of food by the middle of the week, and of picking the kids up at school and shuttling them to their various time-killing activities.

It’s 9 am. Sherri took the kids to school on her way to work and he has the house to himself. He gets up early, even on his day off, but prefers to wait a few hours before breakfast. Eating unlocks his appetite, and he hates getting cravings mid-morning. He spent the early part of the morning steam cleaning the Triexta carpets in the dining room. He and Sherri have wool frieze carpeting in their bedroom, dusty blue, with Durabac jute backing, but he wanted something more neutral, and stain resistant, for the common areas. Nonetheless, you can’t beat frieze for durability, no matter what people think about its outdated appearance. Their frieze carpet has a twist level of 9 turns per inch, and the sturdiest backing on the market. Most people don’t realize that the backing counts just as much, if not more, than the quality of the weave and fibers.

He reaches up into the cupboard and takes out the tub of oats, which feels almost empty. And he’s pretty sure the backup stock is depleted. For some reason, Sherri insists on buying only what they need for a couple of days at a time. He suspects that her aversion to buying in bulk simply comes down to the fact that she can’t be bothered to plan out meals for an entire week. Well, they will start doing things his way now. Planning is the only efficient way to save money, and she would also find that if she put a little forethought into things, she wouldn’t be running around like a chicken with her head cut off all the time. He stirs his oatmeal, puts a pinch of salt in it. He likes his food plain and simple. “Austere”, Sherri calls it. He knows she finds some of his habits depressing, but they don’t seem to slow her down any. She tends to keep to herself and to her activities, to her church groups and volunteering. Nevertheless, she has always stood by him in all his decisions. He would never tell her this, but he does feel that it’s because of him that she turned out so well. She had grown up in the kind of dysfunctional household that saw parents succumbing to fatigue and overachievement and giving in to their children’s every whim. The dubious results of such an upbringing could be readily observed in her siblings’ self-indulgent behavior.

He had gone to live with his grandparents when he was 8 years old. That’s how he ended up in Clarksburg. His grandparents had come out here from the mountains for his granpa to go work at the marble factory, long since shriveled up and forgotten as children’s interests migrated towards more mind-numbing entertainment vehicles. By the time he got there his granpa had retired, forced out due to lung problems. His constant wheezing and puffing made the other workers nervous. A couple of younger men had already quit out of fear of getting glass particles caught in their lungs and hemorrhaging to death.

He lived with his grandparents until he finished high school, then moved back in for a few years after his granpa died. A noble thing to do, everyone had said so at the time but, even now, the thought of it embarrassed him slightly. It just wasn’t right, a grown man living with his grandmother. Things that would inevitably leak out to parents should be kept tightly closeted from the great elders, leaving you, in their eyes, in a perpetual state of innocence. He would lie deathly still in bed at night, sweating with the effort of not moving, fearful of arousing a mistaken dread in her that his fitfulness were due to existential worries, depression or, even worse, lack of sexual activity. He would never have brought a girl home with him of course. Even at 82 years old, the old woman could hear a pin drop on a rug. It was during those two years of stifled existence that he plotted out his carpet business. Right out of high school, he got a job at the flooring store up in Morgantown. He started out cutting and installing wall-to-wall carpets, a task he rather enjoyed. You had one shot: if you cut it too small, too big, or slightly crooked you had a do-over on your hands. His inherent contempt for wastefulness guided the heavy-duty razor knife he held in a perfect 90-degree angle. Working for someone made him hot under the collar though. His boss was a grade-A asshole. A namby-pamby milquetoast who ironed his chinos himself and seemed to possess a never-ending stream of short-sleeved pastel shirts. Fancying himself some kind of color psychologist, he was convinced that the so-called “calming effect” of light pinks and greens eased the mind and made people more inclined to spend money. His sales skills left much to be desired though; maybe because of his sniveling manner, or maybe because of the sub-grade quality of the polyester carpets he peddled. They had a tendency to become anemic over time, their sad little fibers slowly coming undone until your living room looked like the floor of a beauty parlor.

So he decided to go into business for himself, selling fireproof rugs and carpeting. He had stumbled upon a most surprising niche. The local clientele’s taste leaned towards the old fashioned; they shied away from contemporary trends in flooring, such as polished concrete, favoring the wall-to-wall carpeting of their childhood. Nonetheless, they had a very contemporary obsession with safety. Hence the slew of so-called fireproof carpets that had recently appeared on the market. PyroProtecto, Flameshield, Burn Barrier, silicone fire retardant sprays, the list went on and on. Never mind that wool carpets, which are naturally flame retardant, had been around for ages. People were ignorant about these things nowadays: they didn’t know how to keep their linoleum countertops from cracking, how to oil their floorboards, how to keep their bathtubs from getting scratched and grimy.

Of course, not everyone can afford wall-to-wall wool carpeting. So he also offers them nylon, synthetic fibers and, to quell the fire fear in his most paranoid customers, fiberglass weave. Most importantly, he teaches people how to keep their flooring clean without selling them a bunch of expensive “care products”. The proliferation of single-use products makes him sick. He feels a twinge of embarrassment when thinking of some of the useless gadgets Sherri brings home: pizza scissors, a burger press, some fake-almond smelling hardwood floor cleaner for the 20 or so square feet of their house that aren’t covered in carpet. He isn’t taken in by two for one deals, blatantly obvious product placement or “miracle food” crazes. Which is why he had always preferred to do the shopping alone, without the kids tugging on his pant leg and whining after shiny packaging and cheesy smells. There was a time when he was afraid his children would turn into “unawares”, his preferred term for his sloth-like surrounders. Thankfully, his kids were starting to take shape and to show some initiative. His oldest, Taylor, has started up a gel-manicure business out of her bedroom. He isn’t one to discourage entrepreneurship, far from it, but questions her choice of business, not to mention her customers. Girls from the trashiest families parading around his house like they own it. Even so, he’s proud of Taylor: she’s set up a real independent business, has her own supplier and all, so he sees no harm in expecting that she rent out a separate space for her grooming trade. His wife wasn’t so thrilled about this little after school activity, always worrying about the IRS busting in for a few hundred undeclared dollars a month. Fear, in his opinion, is not the appropriate emotion to have regarding the IRS. He has actively discouraged Taylor from filing a tax return, something she wouldn’t do anyway unless he forced her to. He does not agree with the draconian and highly unfair tax rates for the self-employed, especially when it comes to minors. It discourages people from taking responsibility for themselves, pushing them into a lifetime of subservience and wage slavery.

He drinks his last drop of coffee and puts on his rubber gloves to do the breakfast dishes. He takes some time to scrub out the sink with vinegar before he heads upstairs to brush his teeth. It’s past 10 am when he pulls up to the grocery store. Any sooner and he would get stuck in the morning wave of elderly shoppers pursuing, as slowly as possible, the daily activities that barely stave off loneliness and boredom. He has a list ready in his hand, which he hardly needs to look at. He knows exactly what’s in the fridge at any given moment, down to the stray carrot and the last drops of milk. As he steers his cart over to the cereal aisle, he shakes his head to himself in disbelief at the bumbling dumpiness of the other shoppers. Wandering around aimlessly, succumbing completely to the wiles of marketing strategies as old as time itself. He picks out four 42-ounce tubs of steel-cut oats. The store brand, not that overpriced Quaker crap. He exits the aisle, and stops to marvel at a display of the newest cereal on the market. An assaulting red box, with enough health claims to make you reel. He wonders how they can fit so many vitamins in a kernel of purple puffed corn that has more sugar in it than he consumes in a single day. Giant bees, waving bears, hyperactive rabbits. No wonder kids couldn’t even sit through a round of cartoons nowadays without getting antsy.

He himself is not susceptible to catchy slogans or colorful labels. Enveloped in his own superiority, he watches as a frazzled-looking woman in a tracksuit stands on tiptoe to carefully pull down the uppermost box without toppling over the whole elaborate stack. For a few seconds he simply stands by, mesmerized, as he imagines the lower edge of the box knocking into the one next to it, pulling down its neighbors, and the whole arrangement falling down on her head. He shakes himself out of it and leans in to help her, plucking a box out of a spot in the middle where it supports nothing but itself. The woman peers at him dubiously from beneath her bangs and thanks him. He smiles at her; a slightly condescending smile, but she doesn’t seem to notice. Her hair rather reminds him of an old shag rug his grandmother used to have. Her faded blond strands, probably curly once, hang limply around her forehead, giving her the appearance of an unkempt sheepdog. She looks completely anesthetized. He wavers between making his disgust obvious and empathizing with her plight.



Marta Riniker-Radich, A Life by Default, 11:30 min, 2018
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