time loop in aisle 6

in which your intrepid newsletterer gets a real job

“Standing Outside a Broken Phone Booth with Money in My Hand” is a one-hit wonder from 1996, performed by a band from California called Primitive Radio Gods. It is a one-hit wonder of the sort that could have only happened in the 90s, when seemingly every other band on the radio was a novelty act with a silly name, singing even sillier songs. I’m looking at you, Soul Coughing. In the pre-Nirvana, pre-alternative 80s, oddball rock songs like this would never reach the charts. In the 00s, when rock became just another niche rather than the whole playing field, there was no mainstream left for novelty one-offs to burrow into.

I love this song. It’s a good song, yes, but more than that, it possesses just the right balance of fame and anonymity to take me back to 1996, when I was fourteen years old. It was a hit, in the sense that it was on the radio, and video was on TV, but it did not define an era or a sound in the way that Nirvana did, or Weezer, or Green Day, or Radiohead.

The song itself seems to welcome this sort of losing oneself in memory. The repetitive, hypnotic beat, the whispered singing, the sample from an old blues song—it’s memory in motion, stray moments recalled out of order, all at once. Really, it sounds a lot like Play, the album by Moby that would come out in 1999, and subsequently ruling the airwaves for a solid eighteen months. Reaping a level of fame that Primitive Radio Gods never did.

I would hear “Standing Outside…” every so often, on some playlist shuffle, which would compel me to revisit the video on YouTube. A memory of a memory, of memoryness. Now, though, I hear it every day, multiple times, on account of my new job, working at a grocery store.

That’s right, VDL readers: I got a day job.

Have you heard of this thing called ‘money’? Turns out I need more of it to support my family and keep our household going. Regular income on a regular basis. There is, perhaps, a certain sheepishness in saying this. A persistent fantasy among Substackers is that writing here will become their full-time gig, with enough paying subscribers, or institutional investment from Substack itself, to constitute a full-time salary.

I’ve had this fantasy. Perhaps you have too.

But my reality is that I needed a regular job, and my past experience means that I can slot into grocery store fairly easily. I stock milk four days a week after dropping my kids off at school. Evenings, I write posts like this one. It’s enough to make me think:

what if this is the fantasy?

Working a regular-ass day job, supporting my family, writing in the off-hours. Daydreaming as I stock the Yoplait.

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The bridge for “Standing Outside…” features a piano solo that could perhaps best be described as “dreamy.” It sounded dreamy enough back in 1996, watching the video on VH1. But it sounds downright ethereal when it’s 10:15am and I’m facing the coffee creamer in advance of the lunch crowd.

Music played over the speaker system at a grocery store has a strangely isolating effect. Usually it’s familiar pop and rock hits that inspire drive-time singalongs when it’s just you in your car. But no one is singing along at the store. Or if they are, it’s under their breath, whispering.

A song like “Standing Outside” isn’t meant for singalongs, though. It’s moody and introspective, and since it came out in the mid-90s, it managed to squeak onto the radio, where it somehow, almost 30 years later, got selected for the in-store playlist of a regional chain.

It’s not like it plays every so often when I work a shift at the store. It plays 2 or 3 times a day, at least, in highly steady rotation. Which raises the question: is there marketing research that supports such a choice. Do customers buy an extra bag of potato chips when the music has them feeling dreamy, remembering their own youths?

I know what it does for me. It lets my past superimpose itself on my present, myself at 19 working at a grocery store beside myself in my early 40s also working at a grocery store, occupying a weirdly similar position, though the path that brought me here was more than I could have imagined back then. Always returning to the store. Walking down an aisle to find myself staring back.