Waiting for the Last Gasp – Adam Overland

Has anyone ever finished a jar of salsa, or does one after another get pushed to the back of the fridge, until one day you open a jar and see that it is now a petri dish, mold and all, confirming your suspicions and allowing you to finally toss it without experiencing much moral duress?

I was at an Aldi grocery store recently and saw a jar of chipotle lime salsa, picked it up, then put it back for exactly this reason. I shop almost exclusively at Aldi now, a victim of inflationary pressures, like so many of us. Not that I have anything against Aldi—it’s just a little out of my way. And the last time I shopped at Hy-Vee, A1 steak sauce was $7, while a microwavable 10 oz chickpea tikka-masala pouch that was $2.99 18 months ago is now $6. 

That seems more like robbery than inflation, but rather than complain, I just head elsewhere. Aldi will work for me until that also gets too expensive, at which point there are dozens of squirrels and rabbits in my yard, animals that are technically my property, or at least, with stand-your-ground laws, they are the potential victims of my unreasonable fear and overly aggressive self-defense. 

At Aldi, after filling 3 bags of groceries I made my way to the parking lot, started my truck, put it in drive, then put it in park, turned it off, reached into the back seat and pulled a slice of cheesecake out of one of the grocery bags and proceeded to eat it like a slice of pizza. 

I have poor self-control, especially around food and anything else a person can ingest, and cheesecake isn’t the only thing I’ve eaten in the parking lot of a grocery store. A whole rotisserie chicken is my most common victim, and on several occasions I’ve devoured half of one in my vehicle. Once, I didn’t even make it that far, tearing off a leg like some kind of rabid hobo while walking toward my truck, then setting the whole chicken on the dinner table/hood and standing there like a monster, tossing the bones for some parking lot seagull or late night raccoon—a lonely hobo’s only friends. I always keep a full roll of paper towels in my vehicle for just such a greasy occasion. 

I should note that I have nothing against hobos and don’t use that term in a derogatory way at all. I have nothing against homeless people or hobos and don’t really know the difference between the two. Hobo, I think, is an old term, an appropriately friendly term of a bygone era for a homeless person, but more of a wandering homeless person who traveled by hitching rides on trains and being beaten for it if caught. There are books and movies about hobos, who seemed to have a certain enviable wanderlust that many of us recognize within ourselves, but that we were either too financially fortunate or too fearful to act upon. 

When I first moved to Minneapolis in about 2003 I made $16,000 a year and lived in North where I paid something like $200 a month for a basement room with no windows in a friend’s house. I shopped at a grocery store that still exists today called So Lo Grocery. Once, while I was checking out, a guy ran past the cash register next to mine with his arms full of steaks. They had a security guard for just such an occasion, but he was, unfortunately, not much of a runner. 

So Lo carried a lot of foods that were about to expire, or, if they were fresh, like meat, they had expired and were then frozen on the day of expiration. But steaks are expensive even when discounted, and sometimes you have to treat yourself. I get it.

I still drive by So Lo every once in a while, and it’s alway packed. North Minneapolis is a poorer community, and if you want to stretch a dollar, it will go further at So Lo than anywhere I’ve ever grocery shopped. 

I was working 40 hours a week at an unpaid internship and another 20+ at a part-time job that paid actual money at the time that I was living in North. I had a journalism degree and at least a better than average substance abuse problem. What money I did have I spent on cigarettes and whatever else came my way that would make me feel different from who I was then, which in my mind was a failing writer, until eventually I became so depressed that I ended up locked in the psych ward of a local hospital for a week. 

I guess the moral of the story is that it’s difficult if not outright unhealthy to live on $16,000 a year (that’s about $25k today), and many people in the U.S. live on less than that. You can save more if you don’t use alcohol and drugs, of course, but saving isn’t really a thing when you don’t believe in a future. 

But things have improved significantly since then. I now make more than $16,000 per year and I own my own house a few miles west of North Minneapolis. I don’t shop at Hy-Vee (no offense to anyone who does) but I don’t shop at So Lo either (no offense to anyone who does).

I didn’t become a hobo and might have missed out on some opportunities for adventure there, but I did become a writer/editor with enough success to warrant a salary that puts me in a truck at an Aldi parking lot dining on a $3 slice of cheesecake, windows down and smelling the buds of a nearby beautifully blooming crab tree and feeling glad to still be alive, waiting for the last gasp in the meantime. So maybe the moral of the story is that if you just keep going, the food eventually does get better.

In retrospect, I should have gotten the salsa.