CNF: Locally Sourced Sadness
by Adrian Potter
1.
I once cried in a liquor store because they sold out of the brand of bourbon I craved. It was just days after my mother passed. There I stood, in an aisle filled with limitless booze options, cheeks stained with tears, openly wondering about mercy, whether the universe had decided I didn’t deserve what I wanted most.
2.
I have spent money I didn’t have on things I didn’t want, just to feel alive. Just to possess something new when everything felt like old hat. After all, shame is easier to clutch onto than hope. Lottery tickets, avocado toast sprinkled with feta, detox supplements. As-seen-on-TV gimmicks, earbuds, bubble tea. Locally sourced sadness, handcrafted in small batches. A quiet kind of tragedy, to squander cash on synthetic satisfaction. But some nights, even a sliver of satisfaction feels like heaven.
3.
I understand the urge to say you can’t do anything right. I have muttered it to myself more times than I can count.
4.
My identity has become a bunch of mismatched stories that don’t seem to fit together, but they always have. They always will.
5.
These days, I am finished trying to wash away my wrongdoings. Even baptism leaves something behind. Some things are meant to stay with us, so we remember how far we’ve come.
6.
It was never about the bourbon. Sometimes it feels easier to grieve over what’s temporarily missing rather than admit everything I’ve permanently lost.
7.
It feels like a thankless form of faith, to keep preaching optimism to the listless congregation that populates our world. But I do. I have. And I will. Not because I’m right, but because I still believe in the gospel of trying, failing, and trying again. Amen.
Adrian S. Potter humbly lives in Minnesota on the traditional, ancestral, and contemporary lands of the Dakota people. When he’s not silently judging your beer selection and record collection, he’s writing poetry and prose. His work has appeared in over 300 literary journals, magazines, and websites. Potter has authored four collections of poetry/prose/hybrid work, including “The Blues Handbook” (Thirty West Publishing) and “And the Monster Swallows You Whole” (Stillhouse Press). Visit him online at http://adrianspotter.com/.
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What surprising, fascinating stuff can you tell us about the origin, drafting, and/or final version of “Locally Sourced Sadness”? The first section of this piece was the catalyst. My mom passed away last year, and the grief hit me like a Mike Tyson uppercut. One day, my wife sent me on an errand to a big box liquor store, and my eyes welled up. It was some odd combination of grief and me throwing a mantrum because both the booze I wanted and my mother were things I could no longer have. From there, I started looking at other fragments of writing that explored the intersection of consumerism, grief, spirituality, and the messy process of working through trauma. I needed to unpack those ideas, so I arranged the fragments like a mosaic. Together, the small slices of prose cast a larger shadow than they did individually. The piece originally had some mundane, emo titles until a friend pointed out that “locally sourced sadness,” a play on hipster foodie culture, was something only I would try to create. “If that isn’t the title of this, I don’t know what,” they said. That title sparked the final revision process. Once I had it, I saw more clearly what belonged and what had to be whittled away. I looked at each section through the lens of those three words, leaning into the tension between a marketed, curated phrase and the involuntary messiness of sadness—the human urge to package, label, and sell even the things we cannot control.
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