dumb dumber to — and i still went back to the supermarket

dumb dumber to is the title and also the way i walked back into the supermarket after the manager incident. the third yoga mat watched from the couch. the microwave plate spun in the wrong direction last night, which is the only direction it knows. the kitchen forgave me anyway.

so that is where we begin, on a wednesday, with a phrase that is missing two letters compared to the official one and the small dignity that comes from owning that. i am writing this from the desk on the morning after the kitchen unload, while carla is upstairs in the q3 reforecast and is, by my reading of her tab strip, not coming back before lunch.

desk, wednesday morning. carla took a notebook and a coffee into the reforecast, which is the universal hostage-signal of a meeting that will run long. the rest of the morning is, in practical terms, mine.

the phrase dumb dumber to exists almost entirely as a search bar accident. nobody types it on purpose. it is what comes out when the conjunction and evaporates, the numeral 2 collapses into its own homophone, and the index finger lands on whichever key is closest. that string still connects, through the polite mechanics of search, to the actual 2014 farrelly brothers sequel. for the larger category that holds all of these spellings, see the pillar i drafted at this same desk on what dumb means in plain language; this post is the satellite that landed on the typo.

DUMB DUMBER TO. NO AND. NO TWO. JUST. MOVING.

dumb dumber to, the rewatch loop

here is the rewatch loop, in plain language. you watch the first film on a sunday because it is on a hotel television. you watch the sequel, years later, on a small apartment screen, and the sequel is, at minimum, the same two men still being themselves, only older, on a different road, in different shoes. the loop is the point. the title dumb dumber to, in this misspelling, is the loop laid flat. the conjunction is gone. the number is gone. what remains is the engine. dumb. dumber. to. an arrow. a comparative. a destination that the film, like all good road films, never properly arrives at.

i rewatched the original last weekend, on the couch, and the sequel queued up after it because the streaming service believed, correctly, that i would not stand up. for the original, the case is already drafted in the defense i wrote at this same desk for the 1994 manifesto. this piece is about what happens after the rewatch ends and you are still on the couch and the kitchen, behind you, is making a small quiet noise that suggests it knows what is coming next.

the loop is: watch the film, eat the lasagne, get hungry again at 9pm, go to the supermarket. the loop has a name now. the loop is called dumb dumber to.

the supermarket trip i did not need

here is the trip, as honestly as i can reconstruct it without a receipt. i went, on a wednesday, for milk. one item. milk. the kind of trip that should take seven minutes including the walk and the small talk with the man at the till about the weather and the small ceremony of declining a bag.

i came back with: a pineapple, half a price-stickered loaf of focaccia, a can of nutritional yeast, a magazine about boats that i recognised, on the bus, as the same magazine i bought in march, four batteries of the wrong size, a bag of what the supermarket has decided to call ancient grains, and no milk. the trolley took me hostage, again. the trolley has, over three years, learned my routes through the aisles better than i have. that is, in plain terms, the supermarket failure storyline. that is, in plain terms, also dumb dumber to as a verb. i had been there before. i went back. that is the whole sentence. that is the entire grammar.

the manager, a man whose name tag says R and nothing else, watched me push the trolley into the express lane with seventeen items, and said nothing, because R has, by now, decided i am not a problem worth solving. R has the patience of a barometer.

the kitchen unloading, with the third yoga mat watching

here is the unloading, which is its own small ritual. you come in with the bags. you put the bags on the kitchen counter. you take each item out, in order, and discover, item by item, what you actually agreed to during the trip. unloading is when the dumb becomes legible.

the kitchen, on wednesday night, became legible like this. the pineapple went on the counter and looked up at me. the focaccia went next to the toaster. the nutritional yeast joined the can of nutritional yeast i already had, which i discovered on the second shelf, opened, with a use-by date from october. the boat magazine went on the small table next to the boat magazine from march; both have the same hull on the cover, slightly different angle. the third yoga mat, which lives under the couch in the next room and is in a state of presumed slow evolution, was, i am almost certain, watching the unload through the doorway. the third yoga mat has been watching this kitchen for fourteen months. the third yoga mat has, by my count, opinions.

sparky, the fork with the black mark on one tine from the sixth microwave incident, was on the counter from breakfast. sparky did not move during the unload. sparky has seen worse. sparky has, in fact, been the worse.

the microwave plate take, since it spins regardless

the seventh microwave, which arrived on a thursday last winter, has a small turntable inside it that spins whenever the door closes, regardless of whether anything is on it. the turntable spins, in fact, even when the microwave is off, if you tap the plate the right way with a finger and let physics do the rest. that small fact is, on its own, the seed of the take i have been holding for three years.

the rotation, by the way, is the only direction the plate knows. it does not switch. it does not pause. it spins clockwise from the front and counterclockwise from the side, depending on where i lean to check the lasagne. neither reading is correct. the plate is doing its one thing. dumb dumber to, in this register, is the appliance.

why returning to the failure is its own genre

here is the structural point. returning to the place where you already failed is, in literature, a respectable genre. it has a name in some manuals i don’t have. but i have the kitchen and the supermarket and the seventh microwave and a third yoga mat with the patience of a low-stakes saint, and that is, in practice, the same library.

this kind of return-to-the-scene thinking travels, by the way. when i watched karl pilkington wander through wonders of the world looking lightly insulted by every monument, the abroad in the title was doing the same shape — an idiot pointed at the rest of the planet, the planet declining to react, the idiot still showing up, day after day, for the next vista. abroad, in that show, is the supermarket. the wonders are the trolley. karl is, in his own register, doing dumb dumber to: he has been here before, he is going back, the sequel is what he came for. that show is, in the spiritual sense, my closest cousin. it is, in the spelling sense, also a small arrow with no clean target.

so when i went back to the supermarket on wednesday — after the manager incident, after the april incident, after the three separate incidents involving a self-checkout machine that i would not, today, like to detail — i was doing what road movies do. i was loading the van again. it always goes the same way. that is what makes it a genre.

verdict, the loop is the plot

so where does this leave us. the misspelled phrase is the engine. the engine has no conjunction and no numeral, which makes it lighter, which makes it faster, which makes it more true to what the films were actually about. the supermarket trip is the rewatch in a different costume. the unloading is the reading. the third yoga mat is the audience. the microwave plate is the closing credits, spinning whether or not anyone is watching. the kitchen is the cinema. that is, by my count, all the seats accounted for.

carla just cruised back through the floor with a fresh notebook, which means the reforecast adjourned for coffee. tab flipped. she did not look in. small clean win.

i will probably watch the sequel again on saturday. i will, almost certainly, go to the supermarket again on sunday. i will come home with a pineapple again, because the pineapple is, in this storyline, the canary. the pineapple tells me whether the trolley is in charge or whether i am. the pineapple has, for fourteen months, been in charge.

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