9 to 5

Something rather alarming happened over the weekend. For many this wouldn't seem alarming, but for me, well, it's a different story. We ran out of beans in the cupboard. I being a crazy stockpiler of canned goods and former grocery store employee, maintain my cupboard like a grocery shelf. As soon as I buy a can of beans, it goes behind the previous cans so that the oldest can is at the front and will be grabbed first. This is something we called "Rotating Shelves" in my previous life.

Being aware of shelf rotation when shopping, I pull cans off the shelf and buy the cans at the back knowing that they are the freshest. I do the same with milk and almost everything I buy, digging until I find the items with the latest expiration dates.
These neurotic behaviors most specifically the stockpiling have been brought into question in the past. With slightly raised eyebrow and subtle smiles, my boyfriend looks at me with that adoring look given only to one capable of coupling with someone as neurotic as my self.

We went to the corner store to put a bandaid on the situation and buy a few cans of beans only to discover that the beans were marked at 95 cents a can. I was shocked. 95 cents a can, really? I thought for sure someone dyslexic must have just started working at the grocery store, switching the 9 to a 5 and vice versa. Unfortunately, I was wrong. Upon visiting another store I discovered an outrageous bean price of $1.29 a can, I accepted the sad state of affairs with a tinge of regret. If only I had bought more cans of beans 6 months ago when they were 59 cents a can. It's amazing that the price of beans, a staple of my poor man's diet has doubled in less than a year.

I hate buying dried beans, but it looks like I will now be stockpiling dry beans in mason jars.

As a child, I remember being at my grandparent's house on their farm in Oklahoma. They had this walk-in pantry with enough food to survive for months without going to the store. Something about it always creaped me out because half the labels were faded and tinted a shade of green. The brands were some I had never heard of and I even think perhaps some of those cans had been placed in the cupboard during the 1st great depression. We find ourselves on the brink of a possible second great depression. My grandmother, having been forced to move to California during the dustbowl (see grapes of wrath aka her life story) has been preparing all her life for a second great depression. Knowing it was only a matter of time, she has been patiently building her reserves.

I live a world away in New York. I was born into the commercial excess of the 1980's and the proliferation of Public relations and marketing to the masses. I was part of the MTV generation but grew up in a town that didn't have MTV. I didn't even see MTV until it had morphed into the epicenter of reality television, a plague that has swallowed popular culture and vomitted out people like Paris Hilton, Clay Aiken, and a heard of forgettable ladder climbers clinging to their five to fifteen minutes of fame. Despite the distance in time, space and generation, like my grandmother I find myself stockpiling canned goods, building my reserves and preparing for some sort of tragedy. Sometimes I wonder if this makes my cynical, practical, crazy or all of the above. No matter what it means, instinctively, like a squirrel burying nuts, I forage through the isles of grocery stores looking for choice nuts to bury until some sort of winter brings hunger. It is impulse. It is instinct. It is what needs to be done. The urgency for which this task holds in my conciousness is ever growing. It is this urgency which scares me most.