Gimme the Biggest Spinners You've Got. That's Right. On the Bike.

I walked into that store and went straight for the food equivalent of spinners. Due to some crimps in my unbelieving brain, I shied away from the organic bananas which cost 50 cents more a pound than the normal ones, but went straight for the rainbow trout.

I've visited this place before. There are only a few things there I can afford on my own, all of them in the legume family. But I'd window-shopped all the sweet shit. This time I was there to BUY. I only looked at the price tags to satisfy myself that this particular item really was the most expensive version they carried. I passed up all the sweets, however, due to the residue of a childhood memory. I was standing in the aisle and asking my mother for Lucky Charms, which I passionately loved, mostly to sneak under the kitchen table and pick the marshmallows out of. She said, "No, we can't get those anymore, not on WIC." The WIC (women and children's nutrition) program only allows the purchase of certain foods like meat, milk, eggs, and so on. My childish indignation was very great and accompanied by a revelation that the good things in the world are doled out by powers even bigger than my mommy. And from that time on, I inveighed fiercely against WIC, arguing that we ought to escape them so that we could buy the things we wanted to buy again. Such was the sentiment that filled this continent with my ancestors.

It was this memory that steered me away from the sweets. Because surely the powers would not allow frivolity. But everything I'd gotten was frivolous. That's why I'd gotten it! And the closer I got to the checkout, the more fearful I became. They couldn't allow me to buy this! Do not tempt Uncle Sam! I knew that the cashier, seeing my basket, would laugh at me and shoo me back to the bean aisle from whence I came.

My face got hot as I unloaded the loot. Suddenly there were two cashiers there, and a long line formed behind me instantaneously. What if I had to put all this back?
"How are you today?" (He means, "What, is this payday or something?")
"Fine."
Checking the goat cheese, "Ooh, this is so worth the price" (...of your independence and self-respect).
"Hey, Joe, can you cover me after this?" ("I don't even see the point of working anymore when little Ms. Government can come in here and buy a pint of blueberries on me.")
I handed him the card. He swiped it. It worked.
"You want a bag for all this?" ("Might as well since you're taking everything else in the store.")
I went home and made a piece of flatbread with which to eat my goat cheese, trout, and blueberries, because I considered crackers too expensive. Somehow, it wasn't that good. I didn't relish it. It had not come to me by any work I'd done, or by the work of anyone I knew. I had not had to wait until midnight, ride across town on my bicycle in a blizzard, pick a lock, and climb into a stinking cave to root it out. What had happened?

I never stole food, as a matter of principle, until after I dumpstered. Getting your livelihood from a dumpster is like sneaking behind the curtain at a theater and seeing it all from the inside out. The careful effects of makeup appear grainy and garish, the purple robes look like the thrift store polyester they are, and the new view simultaneously expands and contracts your experience. You have seen through the veneer, and the bigger story becomes apparent, that little affair going on between the director and the lead, the jealousy of an understudy. And even if you go back into the audience, you now see two shows playing one on top of the other. You are an insider because you have broken your character as audience member. You have defied the ritual and passed a barrier. Just so, the vast oceans of good food thrown away undeceived me as to the reality of the grocery store performance, and I ceased to take the contract seriously anymore. These are the options. One can go in by the front door during the open hours and pay $10 for a bag of fine blanched almonds. If one doesn't have $10, one can go to the back door after hours and take the bag of fine blanched almonds, which have been crossed off a list somewhere in red pen. Or one can go in by the front door during the open hours and take the bag of fine blanched almonds, which will be crossed off a list in red pen. This is why I allowed myself to steal, because I knew that it made no difference. The most destructive part of what I was doing did not involve food at all, it involved breaching the agreement that our society stands upon, a contract left over from a time when having food meant that you had produced something. This is not so now. The richest people are too often the ones who have done the least, who traffic in imagination. Need I even invoke the "financial crisis?"

There has been considerable discussion about whether or not welfare is really a helpful institution. According to my (yes, conservative) family, after a while it destroys initiative and self-reliance. The jury was out for me until today. Now I can say, yes, the ritual use of this piece of plastic will damage my initiative and self-reliance. But not for those reasons usually advanced; this is much more serious. This method of obtaining food is destructive because it both situates me within a world of ritual, and shows me that there is nothing to this world but ritual. The most basic human (and animal) activity of finding food is reduced to puppetry. It is more destructive even than stealing, because there is tension in stealing, there is the reality of police, security cameras, desperation; in short, it takes work. With the card, the system enervates itself and reveals its own duplicity. Nowhere do I see the necessity of work. Any rule of cause and effect is broken and I am further alienated from a world in which work produces food and inertia produces want. I drift, full of food that is tasteless, with a lump of sorrow in my throat, looking for something that has been lost, and I think I know what it is. A place where honesty and cooperation are needed and not ritualized artifacts. Rituals that expose themselves as mere ritual are putrid and frightening, and this what the "virtues" are, zombies, which the clever and even the most principled exploit.

Why work at all, at honesty or at growing food, when ritual can pass for work, and when work is an anachronism, with the sentimental sapidity of the horse-drawn plow, and hunger?