Eternal Embarrassment

Nietzsche imagined hell as reliving your life on loop—eternal recurrence. A demon forces you to endure every joy and misery again. Let’s revise the experiment: not your whole life, just the embarrassing parts on repeat. Eternal embarrassment. If that isn’t the full biography, it’s certainly old age. You no longer fit the world. Your butt shrinks; belts stop doing their job. Cheeks sag. Your neck goes a little fleshy. Your interior vocal editor—never stellar—finally quits, so you talk more than anyone asked for, mostly about how cold you are and how the TV volume is too low. You’ve slowed down, and the world—amped on Red Bull—won’t wait.

In two weeks, I broke two Samsung TVs, failed to sync my phone with the new garage-door opener, threw an infantile tantrum, and my wife had to bail me out. She could have gone full prosecution; instead, her annoyance was tempered by pity. She saw me trying—earnest home-improvement flailing—and, when I stumbled, she picked up the pieces. I was left embarrassed and nursing a small crisis of confidence.

So I went hunting for redemption. My family had been grumbling about dinners. Thursday’s Caesar-with-chicken-skewers had overstayed its welcome; they wanted better lunch ingredients—better bread, meats, cheese, and more interesting condiments. As the designated Saturday Trader Joe’s runner, I sat at my computer, family gathered around, actually listened, and updated the list like I was drafting a treaty.

Next morning—Saturday—I launched my ritual at Hawthorne and Del Amo, a tradition I’ve upheld with the zeal of a cultist for twenty-two years. Grocery shopping isn’t a chore; it’s a military operation. My $350 haul is executed with Navy SEAL precision. Delays, obstacles, small talk? Enemies of efficiency. Armed with the evolving list, I dart through aisles like I’m on Supermarket Sweep, a stopwatch ticking in my skull. 

That morning, I stepped out of my gunmetal gray Honda, I caught a reflection in the store window—an angle so unforgiving it announced, We’ve had one too many second helpings. I looked away. Denial is cheaper than therapy. In my mind I’m a sleek, youthful me—190 pounds of toned potential, not the spectacle of a 225-pound man auditioning for the Dad-Bod Calendar.

Inside, my confidence was restored. The staff knows me; they greet me with the friendly heckling reserved for clockwork regulars. If I show up off-schedule, they act like I’ve survived a plane crash. One cheeky clerk calls me the “Larry Csonka of Trader Joe’s.” I play along: “There’s been a Larry Csonka sighting in aisle five.” The rapport was golden—until The Incident. The shelf was barren of unsweetened soy milk—the only plant milk with actual protein. I spotted Mary, the assistant manager, stocking canned goods. I asked, politely, if there was soy milk in the back. She said she’d check, then resumed stacking cans like bullion. Assuming she’d forgotten, I quietly asked another employee to check. Fatal misstep.

By the time I looped back with bread and pastries, Mary had stocked the soy milk—and wore a look that said I’d insulted her canned-goods ethics. In that instant, I crossed the border from beloved regular to pushy customer. Two decades of goodwill, spilled across the linoleum for a stupid carton of soy. If I could time-travel, I’d go home and order a case of Edensoy on Amazon. Once, I entered like Larry Csonka at a Super Bowl parade; now I skulked, head low, list clutched like a last shred of dignity.

Trader Joe’s was supposed to be my safe space, but I botched it—just like the “simple” garage-door purchase. Simple things kept flowering into fiascos. I was busy processing shame and embarrassment when Nietzsche drifted back in: eternal recurrence. Except my condition was worse. Who needs to replay old humiliations when fresh ones keep arriving on the conveyor belt?