While at the self-checkout, a man tries to climb mt. Everest.

It was just me and Sensei at the dojo the night my Sensei’s Sensei died. Even real tough guys get kept late at work and sleep early when the sun sets at 5. I was only there since I’d skipped Monday.

«I’m sorry to hear the news»

«You know, I believe everything has a purpose, but sometimes I don’t know what it is. Just remember, everything correct I teach you I learned from him, and everything that’s wrong I did myself»

«Yes Sensei»

We bowed and Sensei wanted me to pull and throw like a wave, not chop like an axe on a tree. He had me throw him up and down the mat all night, over and over, until my fingers bled and my back ached, never quite right each time. A Judo throw can never be quite right.

On my way back only Jewel Osco was still open, so I stopped there to buy coffee for the morning and there were good looking persimmons and mangoes on sale.

At the Jewel Osco the cashier’s booths are empty and the conveyor belts never run. Everyone has to use the machines, but unlike at the Whole Foods the ones at Jewel Osco have no trust in them. Their digital hermeneutic of suspicion interpolates every mango’s non-linear motion or hand’s backward pull as a violation of law and, in the fluorescent space marked by tic-tacs and snickers, announces a zone of sovereign exception checking point between polis and pantry. When I tell the device I have 7 persimmons an alert is raised and an old Sikh bustles over to be the help on its way. He swipes his badge and hits ‘ok’ repeatedly.

«This thing doesn’t make it easy on you, huh?» I try to make light of the situation— it is funny— but the Sikh doesn’t have the time or energy to chat. He has to turn away because next to me a man is trying to climb Mt. Everest.

The thing about great mountains like Everest or Denali is that you should just let them be. You shouldn’t try to climb them, and not just because a mountain is a great and terrible thing and if you get too cocky and try to climb it you could die up there, like Icarus did when he got cocksure and flew too high. In fact, you probably won’t die. Icarus is an outdated story since people fly much higher all the time now and usually don’t die, just like people climb Mt. Everest all the time now and don’t die since they have oxygen tanks and Sherpas to do everything for them.

No, the reason you shouldn’t try to climb mountains is because mountains are sublime, and the sublime is the best thing there is, along with love. The sublime happens when you behold an other. A great other. An absolute other, something that is totally unlike you and that you can never be or understand, something that is indifferent to you. A mountain reminds you of this, it reminds you of God, with its sheer faces and bergs of ice impervious to your soft, silly organism, the greatest achievements of whose will surely be forgotten in the mountain’s witness of eons.

Sometimes you realize your lover will never understand you. No matter how passionately you fuck and how long you talk on the pillow in the dim light, he’ll never get you and you’ll never have her. Unless you think Narcissus is truly in love with his image in the water, you should weep and fuck again in equal measure, harder than ever this time, when you realize you and your lover can never understand each other.

And you shouldn’t try to climb a mountain. Those who climb Mt. Everest are like people who think that really being in love is when someone just «totally gets you» He who tries to climb Mt. Everest is a coward racked with futile anxiety. He needs the mountain to be like him, to reflect him back, to be made into a monument to his own accomplishment.

But the mountain isn’t a monument to anything, not to Edmund Hilary, not to Big John Henry or the steam-powered drill, and certainly not to you with your Sherpas and oxygen tanks. The man who climbs Mt. Everest is a cuck who fancies himself a Don Juan. He certainly cannot experience the sublime, and I doubt he can really love.

The man at the checkout point next to me is well dressed, of modest stature with grey hair, a soft face, and a round belly, and he is demanding that the Sikh exempt him from the disciplinary procedures of the self-checkout.

«If it doesn’t work I’m leaving and shopping elsewhere!»

He’s trying to assert his virility, his Herrschaft, that he is not to be hassled about and made into a thief like the bottle collectors who hang outside the Jewel Osco. He’s a consumer you see, so he has his sovereignty of his own. The cost of several Sherpas, oxygen tanks, and the best mountaineering gear can fool you into thinking that a mountain has your reflection in it, and perhaps the cost of a box of raisin bran and a jug of milk is enough to get the Sikh to let you feel like you really are better than him. Perhaps it’s enough to get, not Mt. Everest, but a cheap commodity to reflect back to you your anxious conviction that you have some say in all this and that you are in a different class than the surveilled, harassed, and hemmed-in hoi polloi.

I’m not saying there’s anything sublime about the self-checkout lane, but there could be a moment of love there, with everyone you’re in this together with, if you don’t try to climb Mt. Everest.

When I’d finished checking out my persimmons and mangoes I went to the car and said a prayer for my Sensei’s Sensei. I let him know I was glad I’d never make a perfect throw and told him I hoped to teach others how to throw imperfectly one day.