The people you share the planet with are sheep. Non-thinking, quick-to-panic, I-did-it-because-they-did-it, wool-less sheep. This weekend the whole herd descended on the unsuspecting super-market, like a swarm of locusts attacking a field of corn. There’s no logic to what they bought. They shopped like the city was leveled, as if the mother of all earthquakes shook the earth and they drooled and they had the red eyes of rabid wolves, ironic since sheep are ascared of wolves.

It appears that a large contingent among was just waiting for the chance to go post-nuclear.

So a few days pass and Sunday arrives. This is my weekly shopping day. I do everything I normally do, arriving at my local market at eight A.M. When the door opens the place looks like the Delta House after a kegger. I half expected to see Flounder lying unconscious in the ice cream aisle with whipped cream on his face. The apocalypse crowd had picked most of the store clean like a vulture working on a deer carcass.

There was no bread, no fresh meat, nothing in the store made of paper: diapers, napkins, paper towels, toilet paper, maxi pads, coffee filters, index cards, baby wipes … not a fuckin’ trace. The sheep are gonna hunker down and eat their asses off resulting in eleven or twelve bowel movements a day. If toilet paper is in water long enough it dissolves, so I think these mental defectives are planning on actually consuming TP if it comes right down to it, creating the vicious cycle of consuming toilet paper, crapping toilet paper and then fishing it out and wiping with it.

No canned goods, no peanut butter except the low-fat peanut butter which the sheep won’t touch – who fuckin’ diets when the world is gonna end. No bottled water and good luck finding a frozen pizza or a TV dinner.

But the real story, the story that will tell you everything you need to know about how the sheep intend to live isn’t in what they decided to hoard, but in the few things they left behind. The grooming aisle (shampoo, deodorant, etc.) was left untouched. The sheep are looking forward to a long period of zero hygiene … of sweat pants and beanies and underwear stains and body odor. There was plenty of fruit and vegetables left, nothing kills a 60-day junk food binge faster than a broccoli spear. And the fresh food/deli area was still stocked indicating that the herd was running low on funds after shelling out for a pallet of toilet paper and a hundred bottles of designer water.

Anyway, I came dangerously close to turning my cart around and leaving but then I sez to myself, “Hey, wait a minute if I don’t push on and buy a few things then the only people who survive this will be the sheep and then the sheep will be in charge and, well, fuck that.” I bought some fruit and then negotiated my cart through the carnage.

About an hour later I emerged from the store with a cart full of things I never bought before. I admit that I sampled grapes and other items while I was in the store and that I took an item or two out of the carts of distracted sheep.

Let’s see what I got.

I bought nine tins of sardines. Well, there were no canned goods left and I thought I better have something in a metal container. There were several sardine options and I picked the one that had the friendliest looking fish on the package. These will never be consumed but if things get rough and if I can get past the sardine stench I figured maybe I can swallow them whole.

I needed Tylenol and further down that row was the toothpaste and the kids’ toothpaste had names like Bubble Gum Blast and Razzleberry Mint and I reflected, “Hey, in a pinch I think you can eat this stuff!” I bought twenty. There were frozen burritos available and I thought that if our electricity gets turned off because we have no money since we can’t go to work that these could be thawed on the window sill and consumed raw. I took seventeen of those.

The dumb sheep left all of the Easter candy, so I bought every bag of jelly beans. They had a lot of milk because sheep are vegans and don’t do dairy … I stocked up. I bought a hundred packs of raisins and a case of spicy peanuts and thirty little tubes of SuperGlue so I could seal up the doors and window to keep out germs. I bought so many bricks of cheese that you could construct a house and then I filled the little rack under the cart with beer and then piled on top of my cart was, well, beer and I pushed it to the checkout stand holding … beer.

Don’t let the stupid sheep win.

Photo on Visual hunt