The interior of a Walgreens in Orlando, Florida, via Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under CC0 1.0.
I think buying a wrap in a pharmacy is incredible. I once bought a huge wrap in a Walgreens in Manhattan. It came with a sachet of extra mayonnaise tucked into the packaging even though it was already heavy with mayonnaise. I bought it and a thin can of Coke Zero and ate and drank while walking, like an actor. It’s usually a kind of chicken prep inside the wraps I like but it’s so unrecognizable to the mouth and the eye as to be moot, the name, the food question, and likewise the preparation who knows. A wrap is chopped foods folded up in a bib of parcooked very flatbread. Once folded, it looks like a handmade food tube with hospital corners at the ends to stop the food tumbling out when it’s lifted vertical to eat. I eat it, or someone else eats it, and thinks of drastic things coolly. The best wraps are cave fish and peter forever outside time. That goes for a lot of what’s happening when I’m inside of a big pharmacy. I feel outside of time and outside of my life. I go into a big pharmacy when it’s dark outside. I buy a wrap and a fizzy drink with my earbuds in listening to my music. My music lends the whole thing a cinematic thing. I’m the crushed protagonist buying a corpse-like wrap and a thin can of Coke Zero on another planet the same as this one. I’ll take my earbuds out to pay unless there’s a self-checkout. A self-checkout’s good for buying food at the pharmacy. The fantasy ennobles whatever and lifts what from the outside looks miserable but is not. When I have food in that’s bad for me I’ll bolt some of it then bin the rest and pour bleach over it in the bin so I can’t fish it out later and eat it, then I’ll smoke the first cigarette from a new pack then go to the sink and hold the rest of the pack under the cold tap on full or I’ll have a first few pulls on a cigarette and pluck it from my mouth and flick it some irretrievable place. The expression on my face won’t change; when there’s no one around I needn’t be convincing. This is very realistic; my feelings happen internally. I’ll have half a glass from a bottle of wine then upend the rest of the bottle into the sink. I like making whatever bad thing irredeemable because I don’t trust future me to be consistent with current me. I know I’m inconsistent and this can be frightening. Self-love is an unobservable phenomenon that cavils forever. I should be punished but not killed outright. I bought a big bag of Doritos in Blackheath in the morning and started eating them in rough stacks outside the shop. I then sharpish turned and emptied the rest into a bin there and used the empty Dorito bag as a shiny mitt to force the Doritos deep into the bin, then. Everything else in the bin groaned and shifted downward. When I’m alone I’ll buy processed foods and unrefrigerated premixed alcoholic drinks. Once, my mouth was full of Dorito pulp and room-temperature vodka maracuja drink outside a späti in Berlin in the summer, great. Cool Original Doritos have a remarkable savory flavor I can’t place. The bag has a lot of blue and black on it, as well as dramatic photos of the Doritos. Blue and black are inedible executive colors. They mark the contents as exclusive and ambitious. I think it’s Cool Ranch flavor in the U.S., a thick dressing. I like processing Doritos with my mouth. Saliva piddles moisten while molars pound to a paste. I compress the paste between my tongue and the roof of my mouth to make now Dorito-flavored and colored spit leach from it and get into me via ducts. The paste remainder forms a curved cast and this is a remarkable temporary food object. I cut the soft cast object into neat nothings with my teeth then and swallow it easily. I’m just getting rid of shapes down a chute. The thing we all go to Doritos for is the intense flavor and astonishing color. Dorito flavor is staggering. It can be easily decoupled from the corn medium inside my mouth. The flavor and the color of Doritos cheers me up no end and the lurid smut on my fingers. I like eating all kinds of cheese puffs. They don’t pique my loathsomeness much as they’re just aerated packing material, a deniable foodstuff at the far end of edible. I eat cheese puffs with an urgency that from the outside looks like mechanical efficiency but isn’t it’s just noise in me, it’s squirming almost nothing perhaps pleasure’s dust there’s nothing to it. The cheese flavor of cheese puffs varies within a small window only, whereas actual real cheeses have many different ones. When an ideal of course ghosts I toss the future after it. Silk Cuts are okay when they’re customized: cover over the perforations with a torn-off glue strip from a cigarette paper or you can clamp two fingers over the perforations while you smoke to make it proper strength. I do something similar with my vape nowadays. I part-block a valve near the mouthpiece of the vape with my fingertip and in this way I can throttle the vapor. The vape mouthpiece is musical-feeling, like a child’s first wind instrument. Stuff from my mouth and lips comes off on the mouthpiece and can gather in the breathing hole but I can always get a pin or a sharp pencil and gouge the stuff out and wipe it on a trouser leg. I keep the vape in one of my two trouser pockets. Sharp lint from my pocket can get in the breathing hole and shoot into my unsuspecting throat when I vape it. I like vaping all of the time. My vape provides me with my home planet’s gas mix without which otherwise I’d suffocate on Earth’s mix. As with my voice my exhalation made visible by vape in it is an aspect of me that flees me to be with the world and never to return. I like that there’s formaldehyde in vapes but I don’t like popcorn lung. When the juice runs out I taste burning metal. When the juice leaks into your mouth sometimes oh, it’s very obviously poison I’m pulling in. I know about formaldehyde from alien fetuses and big decapitated heads in jars of it but I don’t know about popcorn lung. It’s a very evocative name and an ominously fun euphemism I won’t look up the reality of. I secretly vape on planes, in cinemas, in concert halls; everywhere you can’t vape you can actually very easily vape without discovery. I palm the vape like an inmate. I ensure the little glowing display’s hidden. I look straight at anyone nearby so if they try looking at me they’ll be met by my gaze before they see that I’m vaping so that they’ll immediately look away. This sort of preemptive gaze is weird, it repulses other’s sight; it relies on being there first, looking first, and on protocol. I pull on the vape and hold it in for as long as possible so that the vapor dissipates in me. By the time I breathe out there’s no giveaway vape opaquing my breath. In circumstances where vaping’s not really okay to do I take care to pull on it when I’m quite sure it won’t be my turn to talk or laugh for about twenty seconds, which is about how long the vape takes to entirely dissipate in me. During this time I smile and nod while I hold it in. I can do it. I presume it’s fine to vape everywhere or I don’t care if it is or it isn’t. I have the gall to do it in someone else’s house just in front of everyone midconversation without asking. If someone says something I feel terribly guilty. I feel for myself via remembered stilled machines still warm to the touch. I’m shadowing myself through a history of my own impersonal sentimentality the pining for which electro-plates the meaningless with a rose zirconium-like. I sat alone on a low stool at a low table in a pub lounge and customized a Silk Cut. The table and the stool were genuinely small. There was an empty blue glass ashtray and a drained pint glass marbled with beer foam scum on the small table which was round and a brown metal spackled with little hammered divots. My hands are seen from an instructional isometric perspective and my concentrating face is in close-up which in this sequence bravely allows itself the ugly repose of the unobserved. I gave an unaffected performance with my jaw slackened. I bulged some. No visible musculature and no visible veining on my arms. What was I? I’d a pad of green Rizla, a purple-and-white Silk Cut ten-pack and a black plastic lighter with a silver cuff. I got a cigarette paper and tore the glue strip off it. I licked the glue strip and wrapped it around one Silk Cut’s midriff to dress the perforations that make it healthy, closed. Then I took up the lighter and ground the striking wheel slowly with my thumb, moving the lighter up and down just above the Silk Cut, milling invisible flint bits over it. Then I smoked the Silk Cut and the flint bits once caught spat glum sparks when the lit tip was on them. The sparkles and the blued smoke dawdling around my head made my head look like a monument to something on the night of its national holiday. This was when you could smoke inside pubs in the UK. When I run out of cigarettes I collect the squashed butts from the ashtray, split them open along the middle with my thumbnail-like minnows, and empty the stinky spent tobacco into a new cigarette paper to smoke. The catch when smoke goes haltingly past my epiglottis is abject but I could be wrong to use those words—abject, epiglottis. The catch resumes disbelief and with it my body happens in my embrace by myself of it. I know it’s a turnstile, I know it admits smoke or not, I know it’s not the pink teardrop. People start smoking for different reasons. I started smoking when I was twelve I rolled Tony and his flunkies’ cigarettes at Sophie’s party in a barn in Wootton and everyone drenched in Lynx or Impulse. I slipped away and walked home when the little brick of Golden Virginia ran out, purposeless. I often walked the many miles home through the countryside in the middle of the night as a teenager, blank I can’t remember feeling anything. There was no one else anywhere. We’d two welcome pedophiles in the village. Jim had no toes but I loved acting. The image of my future radicalizes and pillories my present. I abuse myself in ways. I like eating tinned hot dog sausages drooped onto sliced white, scribbled with ketchup. I like the iron-blood taste of tinned hot dog sausages and their cold makes them seem found, eaten speculatively. I like modeling balloons pumped with blood meal, it seems. Hot dog sausages are a more appetizing prospect than recognizable meats if you’re like me. I eat ultra-processed meat products as a cannibal. The main ingredient in ultra-processed meats is the ultra-processing, the ultra-processing’s culture and its technologies and histories rather than the beautiful pig in the past. Cannibalism is the correct way to be.
From Flower, to be published by Fitzcarraldo Editions in April.
Ed Atkins is a British artist based in Copenhagen who is best known for his computer-generated videos and animations. He is the author of A Primer for Cadavers and Old Food.
