A Canticle for The Grocery List Guy...

There are many places on the Internet to waste time, but this is one takes the prize. It is a collection of grocery lists that some guy found. He began collecting them in the nineties and at some point the Internet became savvy enough to accept his collection as a website. I’m torn about this site. On the one hand, it’s hysterical and on the other, it’s just plain, sad. But, then again, imagine if we had a collection of thousands of hand-written notes from people who lived two thousand years ago.

You can imagine how fascinating that would be!

If you ever read the book, A Canticle for Leibowitz, this is familiar. In that book, a post-apocolytic society on Earth vows to simplify and then proceed to destroy all books because they blame science for the nuclear holocaust. Liebowitz, a Jewish engineer, converts to Catholicism and starts a cult to preserve knowledge. (I guess A Mitzvah for Liebowitz just didn't have the same zing as Canticle.) They save books, calling it booklegging. In the story, hundreds of years later, a monk finds a storage of hand-written notes by Liebowitz himself, one being a grocery list reading, “pound pastrami, can kraut, six bagels–bring home for Emma.” The monks see this as a miraculous discovery, the original writings of a potential saint. Though it causes problems since the miracles are so bountiful that it threatens Leibowitz’s sainthood.

I’m not sure if this site is all that important. If this guy becomes beatified because of it then I’m in the wrong business. As for time wasting, it’s like watching the status bar on your computer tick by as you copy files or download illegal music. (Which I never, ever, do, by the way.) While you know that there are so many better ways to spend your day, like say, working, it’s quite therapeutic. Gen X never had it so good.

Try it out for yourself but if you get fired because your boss is an unironic old fuddy duddy, don’t come to crying to me.

The Grocery List Collection.

LSC

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