Apocalypse Shopping

Not pictured is the can of turkey Spam.

Amazon was all out of regular Spam which I know other people eschew but I like. It’s about my dad cooking Spam and eggs in a cast iron frying pan on our old green Coleman stove on a picnic table at a roadside on a Burma Shave road when I was a kid. But that is a different story. Nostalgia isn’t the only reason I like Spam, I actually like it for its own sake, and, no, I don’t need you to tell me what’s in it.

So, about apocalypse shopping.

This was in the first delivery: four pounds of black beans, two pounds of Dot’s pretzels, and a bathroom scale. I know there is more coming but I forgot what it is.

The black beans were in their own Amazon box marked FRAGILE. What did I order that was fragile, I wondered, as I slit the tape with a knife, unwittingly spearing two of the four bags of beans. So I scooped up the beans and put them in their own bag. We have a lot of beans.

That’s a good thing, right? If everything in the world went completely to hell, which doesn’t seem as unlikely as it did about a week ago, we could live for months on four pounds of beans, if we were careful about portion control and didn’t just slurp them up like there’s no tomorrow.

The Dot’s pretzels would not last so long. If I thought the end of the world was coming, I’d take those two one pound bags of Dot’s along with a six pack of beer and sit on my back porch and eat all the pretzels and drink all the beer and throw the cans in the trees just to watch the birds scatter. Just to be a jerk. I’d let it rip, you know? Screw it.

Now the scale. The scale is for my husband because he weighs himself at the gym and he can’t go there anymore. I think it’s healthier in a lot of ways to eschew scales altogether because if they ultimately have too much control over your mood. It’s like you step on the scale and it goes, wham, you get to feel good today, or wham, time to hate yourself. I hate scales, too much little sinister judgement. Who needs that? Screw that, too.

I am trying to be level-headed here. But there is a big part of me that questions my early life choice not to be a doomsday prepper. Those folks have been sitting back in their webbed lawn chairs admiring their stacks of freeze-dried beef stroganoff and just laughing their asses off at the rest of us up late at night, peering into our laptops, looking for a can of Dinty Moore beef stew on Amazon. I was thinking I should buy a case of Dinty Moore! But why would I do that when I have all those black beans? Who needs Dinty Moore? Screw that, too.

There’s another delivery tomorrow. I can’t wait.

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Word of the day: Eschew (verb); to deliberately avoid using, abstain from; “he appealed to the crowd to eschew violence”