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The first one is a flyer for some themed family camp, entitled Take a Trip Back in Time: Summer Camp, 1995 Style! Dean recycles that one pretty immediately, because, Jesus Christ. Who the hell would want to relive any year of the 90s, anyway. Dean can’t believe people get paid to come up with that shit.
The second is another ad, for a new coffeehouse on 7th and Main. The Corner, it’s called. Dean tosses it.
Then there’s more ads, which is pretty much unsurprising. There are always more ads. There’s also a newsletter for some organization he doesn’t belong to anymore, and an invitation to a bar mitzvah - some kid’s name that Dean doesn’t recognize. Wrong address, probably. Dean tosses it on the counter and figures he’ll deal with it later.
Dean drops his stuff on the kitchen table and walks over to open the refrigerator, which just illustrates how pathetic Dean’s life actually is. The contents are: one almost-empty milk carton, a bag of baby carrots, assorted brands of packaged salami, a few all-organic microwaveable quiches, an apple, four Diet Cokes, and about sixteen of those blueberry Greek yogurts that Sam always swears by. So far, Dean can’t tell what the difference between Greek yogurt and regular yogurt is. They’re both, you know, yogurt. He feels like there can’t be that much that’s fundamentally different with the two of them. Are there specific kinds of ingredients that go into yogurt, or something? Intricacies of the yogurt-making process that he’s overlooking, on account of the fact that he’s not, like, an actual yogurt-maker?
Dean drinks the rest of the milk out of the carton, because he lives alone and who the hell is going to stop him, anyway.
When he’s finished, he gives the carton a quick rinse and then chucks that in the recycling bin, too. The recycling bin in his apartment is very strategically placed over the kind of noticeable dent in his wall from that time he was really pissed off and somehow had it in his head that his foot was going to come away the winner from a mano-a-mano fight with plaster. (Or, well. Pie-a-pie. Pie-a-pared?)
Dean heats up the gross microwaveable quiche and swallows it down with Diet Coke, which makes him kind of queasy later while he’s rereading one of those old Vonnegut books that Sam brought over in the box of stuff he cleared out of Bobby’s old place. The pages are yellower than Dean remembers them to be, and worn, which is kind of weird. Because he hasn’t read this one in years, he knows, and he also takes painstakingly good care of his books. Still, maybe it wasn’t anything he did. Maybe age just trickled through the slits of the cardboard box and old crinkly yellowness spread like mildew, seeping into the binding and the page corners and the cracked cover.
Time is like this, Dean knows. It leaks into everything, escaping notice, until one day you open a box full of memories you remember freshly, and as it turns out, they’ve all been turned a dingy, faded sepia color that doesn’t quite carry the same fondness that it did in your mind’s eye.
He’s got a headache, now, a bad one, so he puts the book down and rubs his eyes and flips on the TV before heading back to the kitchen to grab that lone apple before it goes bad.
When he comes back in, the 10’o’clock news guy (who’s face is pretty terrifying, Christ, Dean doesn’t think you’re actually supposed to get that much work done) is talking excitedly about some meteor shower type thing that’s confusing a bunch of astrophysicists up at the university. It cuts to a clip of the shower, and they must be shooting from somewhere around the mattress store, because that guy that always makes predictions about the apocalypse is screaming about falling angels and signs from God. Dean shakes his head at the TV screen and eats his apple.