Knock, knock, Neo

So there's this Mega Store in the DC area called Wegmans, which is like a grocery store, only ridiculously large. It makes Costco look like a gas station convenience store. In fact, it's not unlike the Costco from the movie Idiocracy.

I found myself there the other morning, wandering around amid piles of vegetables, looking for a block of parmesan cheese. I never did find the cheese, for those keeping score, most likely due to the fact that by the time I got to the cheese section (which was more like a giant cheese store), I was suffering from sensory overload, fighting the urge to run screaming from the place and hide under the couch.

The produce section was an epic undertaking of piles and piles of fruits and vegetables the likes of which I had never seen all at once. On display by the front door was a bin holding no less than 500 heads of garlic. Next to that was a table piled high with a vinyard's worth of grapes. Each department was the size of a city block, and as I rounded the corner into prepared foods alley (complete with several full-sized and fully-staffed bakeries and kitchens) I started to feel as though I couldn't possibly be alive and experiencing what I was seeing.

I started thinking about what it would cost to run a place like this. There were no less than 1,000 employees on staff at the time (I counted more than 20 in the bakery alone). Figure each is making about 8$ an hour, that's a staff-only operating cost of $8,000-$10,000 an hour.

An HOUR.

Nevermind the extended run of freezers and coolers, and the amount of electricity it would take to fuel such a thing.

So this thought process led me to wonder how much money they must process through the registers to pay for this. They have to be pulling in $25,000 an hour in revenue just to break even. And that's with over 50% of their capital tied up in perishable goods.

If you're still following me, this is where it starts to get weird.

Looking around at the bakery, the cheese shop, and a diary section quite literally a mile long, I tried to picture where said perishable goods could possible come from. If you figure that the average cow will generate 4-5 gallons of milk at each milking, and can be milked twice a day (these stats are from my dad, a former dairy farmer, so they MUST be right), it takes one cow to make 10 gallons of milk a day.

So to fill a dairy section a mile long, containing several hundred gallons of milk, plus cream cheese, regular cheese, ice cream, sour cream, creamer, and everything else that comes from the udder of a cow, you have to figure that there are several thousand cows working 7 days a week just to supply this ONE store.

I have travelled my fair share of this wonderful land we live in, and I have NEVER seen a single dairy farm that has more than a few hundred cows.

So that means that it would take SEVERAL cow farms at BEST just to supply this ONE store in the metro-DC area - nevermind all of the other grocery and convenience stores in the same region - nevermind all of the other grocery and convenience stores around the country.

Think about the wheat used to make the bread. The sugar cane to make the cake frosting. The coffee beans used to fill the hundreds of bags of ground coffee.

How long, do you suppose, does it take to cultivate a single head of garlic, never mind 500?

The only logical conclusion is that this is all quite impossible. There's not enough farmland left in this world to supply the ridiculously stocked food stores that we all visit on a daily basis. There's no way. Do the math yourself, I'll wait.

The only logical conclusion is that none of this is real. It takes nothing but programming and electicity to create a virtual bag of sugar, a computer-generated head of garlic, a digital pre-wrapped block of parmesan cheese.

Imagine if you will a traveller from the 1920's who wakes up wearing his funny 1920's clothes and fedora hat in the middle of a Wegman's, present day. Imagine his reaction when faced with a pile of 500 heads of garlic. Imagine how surreal this would be to him - they didn't have piles of 500 heads of garlic 80 years ago - they couldn't have.

And there was a lot more land and a lot fewer people around back then.

The only logical conclusion is that nothing is real. You might not even be real. I might not even be real.

And they program the stores to be out of certain things - like blocks of parmesan cheese - to enforce the feeling of reality. To keep us happy. To keep us from pulling the plugs out of the backs of our necks.

Think about that next time you go to Starbucks. Next time you pick up a gallon of milk. Next time you fill your car with gas.

Where are all of the consumer goods coming from? Is there really enough supply to meet the demand of 7 trillion people world wide?

If we all buy or consume a gallon of dairy products every day, that would mean that there would have to be 1 trillion cows in the world. I'll even be conservative, considering that there are little kids in Africa that don't get a glass of milk with breakfast. Or even get breakfast at all. Let's say that every person in the world consumes one gallon of dairy products every other week on average.

That would still require 75 billion cows.

But according to the International Erosion Control Association there are only about 2 billion.

That's not enough cows to supply each person in the world with one gallon of milk each YEAR.

Follow the white rabbit. Knock, knock, Neo...

That's the way it goes...

The thing about writing, in general, is that you either are telling the truth and start from the beginning, or you know how it ends and have to find a way to get there. Take TV show writing, for example: an actor doesn't renew a contract, and now you have your plot point - their character must be written off the show. How you get there is wide open, and depends usually on how likely the show producers are to bring that actor back in the future.

When I write, I generally pepper things with liberal amounts of truth, but I almost never know where things are going to end up when I start. Sometimes this leads me to trail off in the middle, wishing I knew what was going to happen in the story I am telling, but not really able to get there.

This is more truth, I suppose, than fiction is. The best laid plans of both mice and men always go awry, we can't control our own destiny any more than we can control other people, all we can do is to keep steering the car back to the middle of the lane when it starts to drift, which we can only do if we're planted firmly behind the wheel of our own vehicle of destiny.

So never let anyone else drive your car while you are in it.

And remember: that's the way it goes, but it goes the other way sometimes, too...

West Si-eeeeeede!!!

I'm off to LA tomorrow. The City of Angels. I wish it was going to be more exciting, but I'm going on business, and our office in LA is basically on airport property. So is the hotel. So I'll be in California for 2 days, but probably won't venture off airport property.

I'm thinking that doesn't count as actually being there, so after I get back, I still won't have seen California, or visited it in any significant way.

I'm flying back on the red-eye on Friday night because my boss is insane. Check that, the truth is that he has family to return to. And I just have this big old house with a "for sale" sign in front of it, and showings all day long that I have to leave for - dreary-eyed and exhausted.

But it's good. I'm good. We're all good here, now. How are you?

Bad Boys, Bad Boys

HAHAHAHAHAA

Friendface

LOL Suckas