barrettchase.com

barrettchase.com
obey the rules. often enter. organize your material.

Thu, 31 Mar 2011

I don't really believe in the impending 2012 apocalypse. Don't get me wrong, I wholeheartedly believe that the world is going to hell and that we're on the cusp of something terrible. Definitely. But all that Mayan mumbo-jumbo is ridiculous. This has nothing to do with prophecy. Simply put, you can't look at what we're doing to the planet and actually think we'll continue to get away with it indefinitely.

Still, there's not much that an individual person can do at this point to stop it, aside from growing a long beard, donning a secondhand army jacket, and ranting on the corner while holding a makeshift cardboard sign. It sounds like a hell of a lot of fun, for sure. But it's not terribly effective and it makes life even more awkward than usual when the in-laws come to town.

The only sane thing to do in this situation is to start squirreling away lots of non-perishable food items along with household necessities like toilet paper, guns, and Hardy Boys novels.

Normally, in this household, we do our shopping European-style. That means that although we keep a healthy stock of various items such as spices, sugar, flour, beans, rice, and the like, we generally shop for food on the day it will be made. All told, we probably hit the grocery store about four or five times a week for small, produce-heavy shopping trips. In other words, if a catastrophe were to happen here tomorrow, we'd have a few days of unsatisfactory meals made up of tomato paste and vanilla extract before totally caching our pantry and having to fight the zombie hoards to get to the Rice-a-Roni aisle.

DIGRESSION: I once stumbled on a message board where people were talking about the bird flu. This was maybe three or four years ago. The people on this board were getting very prepared for a pandemic, and leaving no subject unexplored. One of the more fascinating threads was about how, in the event of a mass chaos and looting, to dispose of cans and the like without drawing attention to the fact that you have food in the house. One person said that they had designated a spot in the crawlspace under their house where they planned to dig a hole and bury the cans, as any kind of wrappers or food waste stored in a visible location would be an invitation to hungry, desperate people who might do you harm.

For a long time now, I've wanted to have a well-stocked pantry. Though my parents always bought a lot of food, I grew up in a highly populated house where the food stock turned over very quickly. But every now and then I'd visit friends whose cupboards were stacked with food choices. At any given time, it seemed like their parents could whip up any one of twenty meals, and there were always plenty of choices for snacks that any of us kids could just go in and grab any time we wanted.

That probably isn't the healthiest way to live, but I think there is a lot of room for compromise. I'm not going to go out and buy 20 cases of Coke. I'm not going to use the whole thing as an excuse to eat more. But there's something great to be said about running out of toothpaste, then, instead of going to the store to buy more, simply going down to the toothpaste shelf in the basement where you have enough Aquafresh to fight cavities well into the 2020s. You'll need strong, healthy teeth and claws if you want to do battle against the robot armies, John Connor.

All of this, of course, is just my way of telling myself that it's okay to join Sam's Club. Your life may depend on it, Barrett. It's completely justified.

Ach. No. No it isn't.

[filepath: /journal]