Perforated Lines (you can't resist 'em!)

(a well-stocked fridge) 
-- Tuesday, November 23, 1999 --

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3:19 a.m. Fridge and pantry look full, right? Wrong. Do you see a big 'ole Butterball turkey all white and plump and fat anywhere in these pictures? I didn't think so.

Although it looks as if I've got food to spare, victuals and condiments galore ... in fact what I really have an awful lot of, with more coming in every single day now ... is guilt. Hearty heapin' holiday helpings of guilt guilt and more guilt. You'd think I'd learn by now.

You'd think I'd learn from the evidence in front of my eyes. That I am a lucky person living at a lucky time in a cushy, well-stocked corner of the earth. That there's enough food in this fridge to feed a group of normal people for a long, long time. You could live even longer just on the stuff in my small pantry cabinet.

I'm well aware that I've got several kinds of mustard on the shelves, and fresh strawberries, and two kinds of raisin bread. I know that if a disaster occurs, either personal or natural or digital, that I will look back on these pictures in awe.

In fact, in the hour since I took the first picture, the strawberries have disappeared. I got hungry looking at the photo when I was cropping it in Photoshop and now I'm eating a slice of the cinnamon bread. And so it goes.

I feel guilt for what I have ... and for what I don't have.

(mustard)

Tomorrow will be my last real chance to go to the market and buy one of those big, hard, cold, and tightly packed bundles of joy. I don't know whether I will or not. I'm not sure yet. I am sure of one thing, however.

I'm going to feel guilty either way.

No matter what I do I will not watch the TV evening news on Thursday if I can help it. They've been doing the same story since I worked at a daily in Pennsylvania and I went out with my crew and did the story. They're using the same footage. It's the same flea-bitten guy with a four-day growth hunkered over his ice-cream scoop of mashed potatoes.

He's got a plastic serrated knife to cut the white meat and the big TV lights will go off before he stirs his nondairy into the styrofoam cup of coffee. When he looks into the camera, I think of his kids. There's no need to take notes. He'll be back again in a few weeks, on Christmas day.

And there's nothing I can do about it.

I wonder if anybody who is female approaches these holidays with any degree of confidence? If so, I'd like to meet her and learn her secret. She's not baking, and yet she sleeps soundly? She hasn't polished and stuffed and trussed and wrapped and yet she still drives through town with her head held high?

How does she do it?

(milk)

Do you realize that you can never do enough?

That you will never be good enough?

That you will always, always disappoint?

But ... if you stop trying ...

That the world would, indeed, come to an end?

(a well-stocked pantry)

Hide draws these lovely images.

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