Thoughts from the ammo line

Ammo Grrrll is the grrrll of the moment. She reveals herself to be the PANTRY PREP QUEEN! She writes:

Okay. I have overstated my Prepping Cred as any kind of royalty by several orders of magnitude. I understand there are religions that advise their adherents to store up to a year’s worth of food, and at least one serious prepper I know who not only makes his own ammo (child’s play in Prep World), but also has a wide variety of food dehydrators, plus good old-fashioned canning skills, multiple generators, water purifiers and the like. I bow low.

Nevertheless, when there is a chance that my family may be asked to isolate itself for several weeks, I want to be ready to do that. So I have done quite a bit of preparation beyond my normal OCD levels.

First of all, I figure with my incredibly slow metabolism (picture a car that could go from coast to coast burning but one gallon of gas…), I could probably live for most of those weeks just on water and the occasional doughnut for morale and still only lose five pounds. So I got that goin’ for me, which is nice. I can give almost all our stored food to Mr. AG who is a foot taller and whose metabolism burns through probably 6,000 calories a day, no problem. As I write this, he has just consumed five Hebrew National Hot Dogs, two baked potatoes, sauerkraut and two bananas. Also 3 chocolates and a granola bar. And that’s what I know about.

Secondly, I have more than a touch of agoraphobia – odd for a comedian, but perfect for a columnist – and was born to be under either quarantine or house arrest for an indefinite period of time! As a bookish child with minimal social skills, I used to dream of being locked in the public library for several years. The fantasy was vague on important details like food. The highlights of the daydream were simply that there would be no school, no old-maid teachers, several of them psychotic enough to make Hillary and Elizabeth Warren seem almost pleasant, and books as far as the eye could see. Heaven on earth!

You know how when some guy goes off the rails, the “journalists” always interview his surviving neighbors, most of whom swear that “he was a quiet guy, kept to himself, seemed nice enough, this was totally unexpected”? Well, I think I was odd enough that my neighbors would not have been all that surprised.

“Uh, listen, her parents were great. But she used to go into the nearby swamp alone and write poetry. She did not like to play with the other children; she liked to READ! Sometimes she wrote little skits and put them on in the backyard and she once started a newspaper, each copy written by hand and sold it door to door. Just a very strange little girl…”

Had I not met my twin besties in ninth grade, who (miracle of miracles!) also liked to read, and then met my bashert (my fated beloved) as a teenager, I might still be working on my 72-page single spaced Manifesto, wearing a hoodie and sunglasses.

Thirdly, ALREADY, long before the COVID-19 Panic, I had a dread fear of not being able to feed my loved ones. Once in San Francisco when our son was a baby, there was some sort of long-forgotten dairy panic and all the milk disappeared from the shelves of the grocery stores. Or at least the one I could walk to since we didn’t own a car.

One barefooted dirty hippie girl had just finished loading all twelve remaining gallons into her cart. I said, “Look, I have a six-month old. I breast-feed him, but I need the milk for me to make the milk. May I please have just one? You will still have eleven.” She refused. She said she didn’t even have kids and just planned to scalp it to other desperate people. I said, “Well, you haven’t paid for that yet, so if you are going to be a (several bad words), I will just take one then.” And so I did. She screamed in outrage and, frankly, shock, but there were no cameras in stores yet, so what could she do? She briefly considered fighting for it, but thought better of it. I mean, what kind of scary lunatic takes stuff out of another woman’s cart? Without so much as a Swiss Army Knife? Better to cut your losses and move on.

Now since that time, I have always had a full pantry that looks like a food shelf warehouse, two fridges and two freezers, and backups to my backups of everything from the newly-scarce toilet paper, to garbage bags to aspirin, vitamins, and laundry detergent.

Here is my plan in the unlikely event that we are quarantined in our Gated Geezerville. First, we will eat what is probably two weeks’ worth of lovely prepared meals in the freezer – Red Beans and Rice, Moroccan Lamb Stew, Short Ribs, Sloppy Joes, and Turkey-Rice Casserole, to name just a few items. We will eat up all the fresh food in the fridge – various salad fixins, cottage cheese, other kinds of cheese, ice cream, eggs, all the fruits and vegetables. We will eat really well in Phase One, maybe even invite friends over for dinner.

Mr. AG, sadly, will run out of what I call his “Joe-ceries” quite quickly – he eats 3 or 4 bananas a day, so we should hit the Banana Crisis by Day 4 or 5. The Yogurt Depletion would come next. But Potato Chips, Whiskey and Granola Bars will last forever.

I have diced and frozen little bags of onions and peppers. When the fresh vegetables are gone, Mr. AG will raise a glass rather than complain. Given the choice between broccoli and death, he would have to channel the great Jack Benny line, “I’m thinking; I’m thinking!”

If we still can’t get to a market safely when all that is gone, we move to the Involuntary Vegan Stage – staples like rice, beans, kasha, quinoa (a trendy ancient grain supposedly good for you), nuts, pastas, oatmeal, cereal, grits, and soup. I have a bread machine and am not afraid to use it. We have tuna to last several monotonous weeks.

Weeks 6-8 would entail the challenging Freestyle Phase – things like Lima Bean, Salsa, and Cheezit Surprise; my grandson’s leftover CapNCrunchberries cereal with Almond Milk; Aunt Lucy’s gift fruitcake (Aunt Lucy died in 1997) and Gefiltefish (think fish SPAM) with Water Chestnuts, Craisins and Dill Pickles. Pretty much anything left with a calorie in it. I expect by this phase, what with being locked in the house with each other and God forbid, running low on coffee or butter, that an active bartering system could arise with neighbors. “Will trade Vintage 2017 Canned Beets for a banana” will probably not win the day.

Well, speaking of hoarding, gotta run to my gun store to check out the new AR-14 Joe Biden spoke of at the auto plant. He also argued that nobody “needed” 100 rounds of ammo. Oh my. If that’s 9 mm, the idiot is talking about ONE BOX. Gone in maybe 15 minutes at the range. Twenty-some “contendas” in the Dem primary and this is what is left. Well done, Democrats, you must be so proud!