Whenever I’m in a store I photograph the aisles.

Whenever I do photograph an aisle, I fall in love with the symmetry and the arrangements, and how everything is at once perfect and yet chaotic. The milk jugs are all lined up, but one egg carton is open.

I also miss wandering around grocery stores. I feel as though there is such a wide variety of people always in grocery stores that it’s hard to feel out of place in them. Food, as a universal need, unites people, whether they’re lactose intolerant, Gothic, or crazy religious. They’ll all be there, picking up generic branded cereals or strange kinds of local beer. I like blending in and making up histories about the patrons.

I guess I could be nostalgic for wide grocery store aisles because soon I’ll get to be in them. The grocery stores  here are quite tiny, and usually full of bread-fighting old women, or old men who look confused (“What am I doing shopping? I am a man!”).