I’ve probably posted about this before, but when I was a kid we would regularly go visit a relative in Phoenix who had survived the Depression but was so traumatized she kept huge garbage cans in her kitchen overflowing with staples, like boxes of cake mixes. I mean, she had a pretty luxe suburban house and her husband had a good job, but she was terrified they might go hungry again. So it’s kinda sad that my former consort and I now have a set of shelves over the refrigerator that we’ve been stocking for the last 6 1/2 years with backups of everything. We call it the Depression Cabinet, and we aren’t kidding. It was bad enough in Trump 1.0, when we were hoarding during the pandemic cuz even toilet paper was hard to come by. But now we’re stockpiling everything we can — olive oil, flour, hot sauces, tuna, beans, tomatoes, sugar, chocolate chips, cocoa, farro — and marking each package with the date we bought it and the price we paid. It’s bad and getting worse, but we are ready for 2020 times 2029. As someone far smarter than I just said, when you take a couple of parts out of a car, it doesn’t go slower. It falls apart.
