Grocery shoppin' with David Blatt!

Everyone needs to go grocery shopping. Even David Blatt. Let's go grocery shopping with David Blatt.

In recent days, Cavaliers coach David Blatt nearly cost his team a playoff win by calling a timeout when he had none left. LeBron James sank the game-winning shot, but only because he made Blatt change the play originally drawn up. This comes after a report early in the season that Blatt's assistant coach often calls timeouts behind his back. Despite coaching an elite basketball team, Blatt is sometimes roundly ignored.

After the Cavs' Game 5 win Tuesday night, they have won the NBA Championship probably, and Blatt now has the time to get some grocery shopping done. Here is a story told in three acts, titled:

GROCERY SHOPPIN' WITH DAVID BLATT!

ACT I.

Pilot. What's the stench about back there? Smells horrible.
Inventory manager. It's all this fruit and all these eggs. The fruit has gone rotten, and the eggs are long expired.
Pilot. Well, throw them out.
Inventory. Like, throw them out of the plane? Now?
Pilot. Yes.
Inventory. And, like, not in boxes or anything? Just pick them up and just throw them all out of the plane by themselves?
Pilot. Yes.
Inventory manager. Okay. I will do that in just a minute.
Pilot. Thank you. They smell terrible, and they are gross.

ACT II.

Given how much we talk about the future, and how excited we tend to be about it, it seems strange to define it as perpetually, barely out of reach, to deny ourselves the ability to experience it in the present, dying on the hill of a dictionary. Why can't the future be now?

David Blatt is walking through these magic automatic sliding doors, and that's the way he feels about it. The doors don't see him, and they hit him in the sides, because he is David Blatt. And that is the story of how David Blatt enters the supermarket on this day. It is 9:17 a.m., and the day is an apple round and unbitten.

David Blatt learned long ago that a two-handled grocery basket doesn't demand that both hands carry it. Instead, he swings the handles together and neatly carries the basket in a single, closed fist. A man can only tumble through this world for so long without picking up a trick or two.

Coffee. He navigates the little tiled ventricles of the grocery store not with a compass, not with intent, but with whichever stubborn instinct tips the daffodil toward the light of the sun. He just knows. He just knows, and now he is walking heel-to-toe toward the coffee aisl-- oh shit, oh shit, oh God, someone is already standing in front of the coffee.

David Blatt's shoes make little squeaks with each of his uncertain pivots at the foot of aisle 10. He grimaces, and musters a pilot light within himself. The engines inside him belch and burn, and he places one foot in front of the other toward a shelf where someone is already shopping. He is going to say, "excuse me," and shop where someone else is already shopping, even if that might mean reaching across them or suffering eye contact. The moment is here.

The moment is missed; the winds of circumstance and fear blow him further up the aisle, and he finds himself in front of the tea and powdered Crystal Light. He pretends to want some. "Let's see here," he says, and drops a box of tea into his basket. He doesn't drink tea. He doesn't look at the box. No creature knows its flavor, and neither does the Lord, who stopped going shopping with David Blatt years ago.

David Blatt steadies his rudder and prepares for a hairpin turn around the ninth-aisle end cap, which, in voyages prior, have taken him to the Baking Needs aisle. Oil. He is out of cooking oil. As he rounds the Cheez-Its of the end cap, they draw back as a curtain would to reveal a crowd of shoppers toward the other end.

This expedition will not survive two consecutive failures, and David Blatt knows this. He cannot find solace, and now the agents of poor ideas crowd his soul. "Maybe I don't need cooking oil." He dwells upon the possibility of cooking without oil. He thinks of a fried egg growing crunchy, gluing itself to a skillet. He thinks of eggplant, unsavory, wilted like a rotten apple. He thinks upon a hamburger patty, boiled, gray as all forgotten stones. David Blatt grimaces and steps forth.

He has daylight, and grabs a bottle of Wesson without incident. He turns to find another gaggle of shoppers entering the aisle. To breach their barrier would require an arsenal of excuse-mes and let's-see-heres he does not wield. They stop, and hold a conversation. He is marooned in the middle of the aisle. He must wait.

What is a good thing for a man to do? What is a good thing for a person to do in the Baking Needs aisle? He needs not for baking, nor does he want for it. He must create the illusion of purpose. Add to the inventory. Add to the inventory. What will I do with these items? I don't need them. Add to the inventory.

David Blatt fills his basket, but remains trapped by the walls of humanity at each end. He can only compare brands of flour for so long; there are only so many motes of difference separating Gold Medal flour and AlwaysSave flour. Stand there any longer and he'll look like a real goofus-maloofus, a grade-A jimmyjohn. They'll all see him and point and laugh, phalanxes of mockery.

David Blatt pulls out his phone and fakes a call. It is his signature move, and his only one.

Hey, man!
Hey, how's it going. Good to hear from you.
Yeah, if you look at the one, you should uh, documents.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Well that's what I was saying, is that if you look at the document.
Don't worry about it. I am your boss.
[laughter]
I am in charge.
I love you.
I am the boss.
I am the boss.

The phone rings, loudly, while he is holding it up to his ear. Shit. Shit, shit, shit. His panicked fingers fail to mute the phone. An un-panicked David Blatt would know what to do. This is a lesser, shit-scared, marooned-in-the-grocery David Blatt, awash in Baking Needs and terror, and he is suffocating the ring by pressing the speaker against the base of his palm. "I don't know why it's," he offers with a warble, perhaps even to one of the people he's speed-walking past. "I don't know it's something wrong, I don't know why. Phone is, hold on."

David Blatt careers through the barrier of shoppers and carts with all the urgency and pageantry of an injured cargo plane limping to its runway, and like that plane, he must dump his cargo. His inventory, a smokescreen all along, is of no use to him. Hours from now, the night stockers will find canola oil behind the diapers, and a can of vinegar -- a can? How did he find vinegar in a can? How poorly can a man shop? -- rolled under a magazine rack. He drops a bag of flour on the baseboard beneath the mascara; it thumps and offers a little puff of white smoke through the folds of its paper.

The registers come into view, and so does an uncompromising truth: there is no exit but through one of the cash lanes. He bubbles over with dread at the thought: this is one of those grocery stores. He must stand in line with an empty basket. They will see through his basket and know it is empty; they will see into his soul and know his failure.

The queue clicks forward; he is fifth in line, then fourth, then third; it would serve as an extraordinary lesson in mathematics for a David Blatt less terrified. He must put something in his basket. He must not arrive at the conveyer belt without tribute to offer.

There is a DVD rack. He takes one, any one.

There are a thousand warning lights within the unnavigable spacecraft that is David Blatt, and this one is blinking, "YOU WENT TO THE GROCERY STORE JUST TO BUY A MOVIE, THIS WILL BE WEIRD." It buzzes and shakes and is about to fall out of its console. David Blatt is next in line. He solemnly sets the DVD on the conveyer belt and frames it with a divider bar on each side: no one owns this failure but me.

David Blatt wants only to pay and pass without incident. He does not want to talk about the DVD, which he has visited a grocery store for the sake of buying all by itself. The cashier holds it aloft and squints.

Cashier. John Stone, huh?
David Blatt. Jesse Stone.
Cashier. John Stone. Oh that's right, Jesse Stone. Jesse Stone, it says. Starring Tom Selleck, it says, No Remorse. I don't know what he'd even have remorse about anyway.
David Blatt. I don't know.
Cashier. Could be because he's so dang big. Bigger than the town. Lots of hassle for everybody else.
David Blatt. That's true.
Cashier. I mean, look at the box.
David Blatt. I did.

Cashier. He's bigger than the whole dang town! Look! LOOKIT IT!
David Blatt. I am! I'm not disagreeing with you!
Cashier. LOOKIT!

David Blatt believes that through no doing of his own, he may now be in a fight. He is happy to lose every fight; it is what he is for. He is driven by the desire to get things over with; he lusts for the absence of hassle.

David Blatt runs out of the store without the DVD. He is in the parking lot, he is in daylight. It is the least successful grocery store trip the world has ever seen, but he feels as though he has won. For David Blatt, to have reached the next moment is to have won, and all else that fades in the periphery is for lesser souls to behold.

ACT III.

A bunch of rotten eggs and fruit and shit fall out of the sky and get all over David Blatt.