dumb patrick — a name i borrowed for the supermarket

i used the name dumb patrick at a supermarket counter and the cashier wrote it down without blinking. the IKEA shelf approved. brenda the dead plant approved. the spare key dave lost was not on me at the time. mountain people have nothing to do with this, and yet.

so. i would like to clarify, before anyone gets ideas, that dumb patrick in this house refers to patrick star, the pink starfish on a saturday-morning cartoon i watched in pieces around the year 2000. not a real patrick. not anyone’s cousin. a cartoon starfish who lives under a rock, eats things he should not, and is, on a generous afternoon, the smartest of his crew. for the broader category — what dumb actually is, in plain english — i drafted the pillar on what dumb actually means at this same desk a couple of weeks ago.

tuesday, 9:47am, second cup. carla is in the all-hands on the third floor, which means the rest of the morning, give or take a fire drill.

i should also clarify — and i would like this on file — that i am not writing this from under the rock. i am writing it from the desk. the rock is, metaphorically, two rooms over in the apartment, where it is currently impersonating my couch and hiding the third yoga mat under itself. but the desk is the desk. carla is in the meeting. the morning is the morning.

dumb patrick, the imaginary buddy i invoke at checkout

here is the situation, plainly. i have, for about eleven months now, been giving the name “patrick” at supermarket checkouts when they ask for a name to type into the loyalty system. not my name. not a fake last name with a real first name. just patrick. once, a cashier asked for the surname and i said, without thinking, “dumb.” she wrote it. she wrote patrick dumb. i corrected her and said no, sorry, dumb patrick, the whole thing, with the dumb in front. she shrugged. she typed it. i now have a loyalty account, somewhere in their system, under the name dumb patrick, and that account, by my count, has accrued 412 points.

this is, for the record, not a long con. i did not plan it. it happened, in the way most of my supermarket trips happen — under fluorescent light, with the trolley already full of things i did not come for, with the line behind me growing, with the small panic that comes from being asked for a personal detail i did not pre-rehearse. the brain reached for “patrick” because the brain had, that morning, watched a clip of the starfish on someone’s phone at the dentist’s waiting room. the brain added “dumb” because the brain is honest about itself.

i now use the name on purpose. the supermarket has, in its records, a man called dumb patrick who buys a strange basket of items roughly twice a week. that is, in some small way, a comfort.

the supermarket trip that needed a witness

last sunday i went, ostensibly, for milk. one item. you can write that down. one item.

i came back with: a pineapple, three batteries of the wrong size for any device i own, a magazine about boats, a bag of nutritional yeast that i still do not, even now, fully understand, a second can opener (because i could not find the first can opener, which was, of course, in the dishwasher, which is a cabinet that judges you), a bag of frozen edamame, and no milk. the trolley took me hostage. the trolley, on this occasion, was wearing the loyalty system like a nametag. the trolley was, in some sense, dumb patrick. i was the sponge. we shopped together.

at the counter, the cashier asked for the name. i said “dumb patrick” before i had finished thinking. she found the account. she scanned the items. she said, with the cheerful indifference of someone whose shift ends in an hour, “you’ve got 412 points, dumb patrick.” a man behind me in the line audibly snorted. i did not turn around. i paid. i left.

this is a thing about being dumb in public — and i covered the gentler reading of this in the pillar above, but it bears repeating here. you need a witness. dumb that is hidden tends to fester into stupid. dumb that is witnessed, by a cashier, by a snorting stranger, by a fluorescent ceiling tile, gets diluted by the witnessing. the witness is the cure. the cashier was, that sunday, my therapist. she charged me $73.42 for the privilege.

DUMB PATRICK. HAS. POINTS.

and that is the difference between dumb and idiot, by the way. the idiot designation is structural — it implies a long contract with reality that is, on some basis, broken. patrick is dumb in the gentle sense. an idiot, in the older meaning, was somebody you would not trust with the cash register. patrick would, on a good week, be allowed near the cash register.

the ikea bookshelf, holding patrick’s imaginary cookbook

two summers ago i bought, from the IKEA off the highway, a bookshelf called something with three vowels and a k. it had, according to the picture on the box, six shelves. it has, in my apartment, four. the other two shelves are, as far as anyone can determine, in the parts bag, which is in the closet, behind the third yoga mat.

the four-shelf version of the six-shelf bookshelf now lives against the wall opposite the couch. it holds, in no particular order: a copy of moby-dick i have not opened, a small ceramic owl mom sent at christmas, a remote control for a television i no longer own, and a spot on the third shelf where, for almost a year now, i have been telling myself i will put patrick’s cookbook when i find one.

patrick does not have a cookbook. dumb patrick, the cartoon character, the basis for the supermarket nametag, has never written a cookbook in any episode i half-remember. the cookbook does not exist. the spot on the third shelf has been waiting for a book that cannot be acquired. i have, on three separate occasions, gone to the bookshop with the specific intention of buying patrick’s cookbook, and on all three occasions returned with something else. once a novel. once a book of crosswords. once nothing, because i’d left the apartment without my wallet.

the bookshelf is, in this small and structural way, my cartoon. four real shelves. one shelf reserved for an imaginary cookbook by an imaginary friend whose name i give to cashiers. two shelves still in the closet. that is, on the page, an inventory. in the apartment, it is a way of life.

brenda the plant, also a witness, technically

brenda is the dead plant on the windowsill. she has been dead since, by the most generous reading of the evidence, march. i have not removed her. i water her, occasionally, on the principle that water (which is, frankly, the most overrated drink, but a useful prop) cannot, at this stage, hurt. brenda watches. brenda has, on her windowsill, a clear view of the kitchen, the desk, the bookshelf with the missing patrick cookbook, and the spot near the door where the spare key, the one dave lost in 2022, used to live.

brenda is, by some kitchen-law i have not fully theorized, a co-signer on the dumb patrick situation. she was on the windowsill the morning i first said “patrick” at a counter. she was on the windowsill when i upgraded it to “dumb patrick” at the second counter. she was on the windowsill when the supermarket loyalty card showed up in the mail with the name printed on the front in slightly oversized sans-serif. brenda has watched all of it, in the dignified silence of a plant who has, technically, moved on.

i tell brenda things i do not tell dave. dave laughs at the patrick thing. dave thinks it is funny in a way that means dave will, eventually, repeat it at a barbecue and embarrass me to a man in a polo shirt. brenda does not laugh. brenda does not repeat. brenda is, at this point, a better confidant than the spare key dave lost, which is also, structurally, somewhere in his apartment in a dish with coins, listening.

writing this between sips. carla, by my reckoning, is forty minutes into a sixty-minute slide deck, which is the sweet spot of the all-hands.

the mountain people take, briefly, since patrick is from there

this is, structurally, the part where the dumbness cluster tradition demands a hot take. i hold the take. i hold it firmly. mountain people are wrong about everything except cheese. i mention this here because, on a long enough rewatch of the cartoon, you start to notice that patrick has the exact emotional posture of a man who lives at altitude — confident, slow, occasionally correct, generally untroubled by the part of life where the rest of us live and pay rent. the cartoon never specifies that he is from the mountains, of course. he is from a rock, undersea. but tonally, he is mountain. the mountain people take applies. you cannot reason with a mountain person on most subjects. you can, however, ask them about cheese, and they will, on the topic of cheese, be unimprovably right. patrick on cheese would be a useful sequence. they have not made it. that is a missed opportunity in the canon.

this connects to the cartoon morality of being the dumb friend, which is something i went into more deeply in a separate post on a different cartoon hooded character — the one whose hat covers his eyes, but the short version is that the dumb friend is never the punching bag. the dumb friend is the suspension. take him out, the whole vehicle rattles. the cartoon writers, on this, were better anthropologists than most of the books i pretend to have read.

verdict — the imaginary friend is the smartest of us

the new microwave, a long story i won’t fully reopen here, is coming thursday. it will be the seventh. the cookbook spot on the third shelf will, presumably, remain empty into the weekend. brenda will, presumably, remain on the windowsill. dumb patrick, on his loyalty card, will continue to accrue points at a rate the bank app and i jointly refuse to inspect.

elevator just went. that is either carla returning early or the printer toner guy, and either way the desk is no longer mine. i will, in due course, finish this offline, in my head, while pretending to read the slide deck.

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