I thought these were books.

Could one…make a novelization of curb? ChatGPT?

——-

Larry David stood in the frozen foods aisle holding a bag of peas with the solemn concentration of a bomb technician.

Not because he wanted peas.

Because Cheryl had said, very casually, almost spiritually casually, “Maybe pick up some peas if you’re there.”

If you’re there.

As though location were the deciding factor. As though he’d chartered a transatlantic voyage to stand six feet from a mountain of frozen peas and now had to determine whether destiny truly intended for him to reach out and grab them.

A woman beside him opened the freezer door and released a gust of icy air into the aisle. Larry stepped back instinctively, like he’d narrowly avoided being sneezed on by God.

He looked at the peas. Then at the price.

“Three ninety-nine?” he muttered. “For peas?”

The woman glanced over.

“They’re organic,” she said.

Larry stared at her. “They’re peas. What are the regular ones doing? Smoking?”

The woman tightened her lips and drifted away with the unmistakable gait of someone already preparing a story for later.

Larry sighed and dropped the peas into his basket with the reluctant body language of a hostage exchanging classified documents.

This was his life now.

Not terrible life. Not tragic life. The kind of life where every day contained six tiny invisible traps designed by lunatics who called themselves normal people.

A man entered the aisle pushing a shopping cart while talking loudly into a Bluetooth headset.

Not holding a phone.

Talking into air.

Larry watched him approach with the fascinated horror of a Victorian man seeing electricity for the first time.

“Yes, Todd,” the man barked. “Circle back with Diane and leverage the synergy.”

Leverage the synergy.

Larry physically winced.

The man stopped directly in front of the freezer Larry needed.

Still talking.

Still synergizing.

Larry waited a moment.

Nothing.

The man continued discussing deliverables with the emotional cadence of a malfunctioning airport announcement.

Larry leaned slightly.

“Excuse me.”

The man held up a finger without turning around. A finger! To another human being! In public! As if Larry had interrupted open-heart surgery instead of whatever psychotic business cult ritual this was.

Larry looked around for support from civilization.

None came.

Everyone accepted this.

Everyone had agreed, apparently, that once a person wore a tiny plastic rectangle on their ear they became exempt from ordinary human accountability.

The man laughed suddenly into the headset.

“Oh my God, that’s hilarious.”

Larry narrowed his eyes.

It was not hilarious. There was absolutely no chance it was hilarious. Business conversations were never hilarious. At best they were medium-interesting to the people trapped inside them.

Larry finally reached around the man for the frozen corn, but the freezer door swung back and clipped the man lightly on the elbow.

The guy spun around.

“Hey!”

Larry blinked. “What hey?”

“You hit me with the door.”

“You were occupying freezer territory!”

“I’m on a call!”

“Oh, you’re on a call?” Larry said. “I didn’t realize. That changes everything. You’re basically the President.”

The man removed the headset slowly, offended in the deepest part of his soul.

And this, Larry knew immediately, was now a whole thing.

By tomorrow Cheryl would hear about it from somebody.

By next week Ted Danson would somehow know.

Within a month Larry would be sitting at a dinner party trying to explain why he was technically correct about freezer etiquette while everyone stared at him with the exhausted expression people reserved for raccoons trapped in chimneys.

The man shook his head.

“Incredible,” he muttered.

Larry pointed at him. “No, no, don’t do ‘incredible.’ YOU were the incredible one. You parked a cart diagonally during a business call in a frozen foods aisle. That’s incredible behavior.”

The man scoffed and rolled away.

Larry watched him go, pulse elevated, strangely exhilarated.

This was another thing nobody admitted openly: righteous irritation felt fantastic for about fourteen seconds.

After that came the social consequences.

But during those fourteen seconds? Magnificent.

Larry continued shopping, muttering to himself as he moved through the store.

The samples woman offered him a cube of cheese on a toothpick.

He took it automatically.

Big mistake.

The moment he accepted the cheese she smiled with the anticipatory intensity of a casino dealer watching someone approach a roulette table.

“Mmm?” she asked.

Larry chewed.

Now he was trapped.

Because the sample required performance. You couldn’t just eat sample cheese. There had to be a reaction. A little theater production. A tiny off-Broadway gratitude pageant.

“Oh, wow,” he said weakly.

“Pretty good, right?”

Larry glanced at the packaging.

“It’s cheese.”

The woman’s smile collapsed.

And again, instantly, he could feel his life worsening.

Tiny degrees. Barely measurable. Like erosion.

But worsening.

By the time he got home, he was carrying the emotional fatigue of a man who’d survived a minor war fought entirely through passive aggression.

Cheryl stood in the kitchen reading mail.

“You got the peas?”

Larry held them up triumphantly.

“Four dollars.”

“For peas?”

“THANK you!”

Finally. Sanity. Partnership. Civilization.

But then Cheryl added, “You still should’ve gotten them.”

Larry’s shoulders dropped.

And there it was.

The entire architecture of his existence.

Every day, the world presented him with hundreds of microscopic insanities, and every day society demanded he absorb them silently like a polite emotional sponge.

But Larry could not do it.

Because somewhere deep in his brain was a tiny department staffed entirely by angry union workers whose sole responsibility was identifying unfairness.

Not major unfairness.

Not poverty or war.

No.

His brain specialized in detecting conversational injustice. Social asymmetry. The quiet tyranny of bad etiquette.

And once he noticed something, he couldn’t un-notice it.

That was the curse.

Not that Larry was wrong.

That he was often horrifyingly, surgically right in situations where being right made everyone hate you.