It's All Falling Apart: #01

The store had novelty dinosaur-shaped pasta labelled as "children's novelty dino pasta". CHILDREN'S novelty dino pasta.

It had been a bad week. I needed some novelty and excitement to help make it all more bearable and this novelty dinosaur-shaped pasta was just the thing to pull me around. But the implication that this was children's novelty pasta posed an issue. Was I in some way forbidden from purchasing this novelty pasta? Would a tired-looking 24-year-old buying novelty dinosaur-shaped pasta be some kind of social faux pas? Forever branding me as some kind of deviant weirdo in this small upmarket bulk foods store?

I was stuck staring at the novelty dinosaur-shaped pasta pondering this while few customers moseyed around the store. The world is a panopticon – through their eyes, they control. I had been looking at this pasta long enough. It was time to act.

And who decides which pasta is for who anyway? There's nothing particularly infantile about "dino-shaped" pasta, is there? Is there some point at which pasta must cease to be novel? To be without dino? I disagree. We must imagine the modes of spirit and thought that allow for such wonderful things as… cat-shaped croissants; large zebra-striped lamingtons; monkey shaped madeleines. And, novelty dinosaur-shaped pasta.

I selected a small disposable paper bag and filled it with the novelty pasta.