"...of shoes and ships and sealing wax, and cabbages and kings..."

A few years ago I started collecting other people's abandoned grocery lists.
I covet them and tack up on the bulletin board in my kitchen, eight in all. You can tell a lot about a society from grocery lists, you know, aside from what people are eating and why antacid and Beano commercials are so prominent on the telly. Some trends I've noticed:
- the handwriting is usually feminine.
- presumably it is not always the scribe who does the shopping--specific brand names for canned and household items, and individual names of fruits and vegetables are usually spelled out, which leads me to believe that the lists are made for various market-going minions (housemates, husbands, boyfriends, partners).
- contraceptives are never mentioned. Either are alcoholic products. Maybe these are such a given for most people that they don't even need listing... or maybe I'm just the only unaware individual left who hasn't hopped aboard the Complete-and-Utter Chastity Bandwagon.
- additionally, I've noticed that hotdogs are still surprisingly popular, despite the fact that we all know they're made of assholes and snout tissue.
Ah, Americana. How we adore thee.

  


Speaking of Americana, I'm still planning the trip through the southwest with Andy, and one of the most exciting things I've discovered about Arizona so far is its variety of enormous concrete dinosaur statues. Dinosaurs like these ones clamber alongside some stretches of highway... and as kitschy and ridiculous as it may seem, I really want to see them for myself. They're scrawled at the top of my list in electric red pen.