LIFESTYLE

I Have Decided to Become a Hermit

On attempting to fulfill my childhood dream, one bowl of chili at a time.

I always envisioned myself living alone in a cabin in the woods with a bunch of dogs.

This was when I was a teenager, back when loneliness was an abstract concept and the cabin idyll was just a mental escape trap from adolescent dissatisfaction with everything in general.

During my second marriage, I found it almost impossible to sleep without my husband in bed beside me.

Now, of course, I’m the exact opposite and I can’t imagine laying there for eight hours mingling skin mites with another human being.

I have a lot of food stored up from years of getting take-out for my mom, both due to time constraints and because she liked it. Was it good for her (us)? No. Did we care? Also no.

But now it is time to cook, not just to use up the well-past-their-best-by-date supplies, but to save money, about which I am slightly freaking out.

I commiserate with the people who leave their Social Security-receiving relatives in a recliner post-mortem, continue to cash the checks, and then eventually tell the authorities, “Oh, they’re dead? Huh. I didn’t notice.”

I’m going to get in touch with my inner Aldi’s and learn to love both generics and whatever my godawful cooking skills can produce.

At least I can bake.

But woman does not live by coffee cake alone, and so last weekend I made chili. Which means that, for seven days in a row, I have eaten chili.

The gastrointestinal consequences were severe, and like a Russian political prisoner, I was sent into isolation where I may have actually died. The smell would have been the same.

Right now I’m making bread because I’m out of English muffins, which are both expensive and annoying. It’s like the inventor of English muffins thought, “What if you could rip bread into unequal lumps with your bare hands and then jam it into a toaster?”

Sure, they’re “fork split”, meaning you have to jam a fork into them, staunch the bleeding, and then decide if you’re going to save the baby half from the coming toaster conflagration or just let it burn to a crisp.

Cooking tip: Put your smoke alarm in a drawer and just leave it there.

So, yes, I can make bread. But I eat a lot of chicken and chicken byproducts. What can I do about that?

A lot of the people who live around me have chickens. I could… “steal” seems like a strong word. I prefer “borrow”. I could borrow a few eggs. Actually, a lot of eggs. I eat a lot of eggs. And forget about killing anything, I’m not up for that, although I saw my mom do it plenty of times.

It’s not pretty, and the resulting entree is not a plump, juicy rotisserie chicken. It’s more, if a chicken could be old and homeless, that’s what it tastes like.

So I’ll leave my killing to Big Ag. But milk is also going to be a problem. I can make ice cream, and I could learn to make yogurt, but first you need a willing cow for the basic ingredient.

Occasionally I remember that I can actually make milk from the powder I shove in the back of my refrigerator for baked goods that call for powdered milk. So, problem solved. One bag of powdered milk goes a long way.

Meat isn’t really a problem because I’m not a fan, and Hershey’s food and supplies are all delivered to my door.

When the spring comes, I might plant a garden full of all the things I never had time for and then gird my loins for the onslaught of deer and rabbits.

I’m not going to learn how to can because my mom did that for years and years, and I will absolutely, without a doubt, accidentally kill myself if I attempt to can anything. All of my cans will have to come from the store.

Wait, can hermits be online? Is that breaking some kind of hermit vow?

Crap. I’m already forgetting to bathe on a regular basis, so I thought I had this hermit thing pretty much down.

And Hersh needs to go to the park at least twice a day. Can we do that? Oh my god, so many rules.

Look, I’ve got my dog, fresh bread, the chili farts, and some left over Kraft macaroni and cheese that I made last night while watching a documentary about Scientology.

What more could I possibly need?

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