ON STARVING TO DEATH:

Me and my friends live outside, or on the threshold of in and outside. Luck of the draw. Normally this wouldn't be a problem, but food (around 98% of edible food, what doesn't end up in a dumpster that we then pick clean) is inside.
Once upon a time food was exclusively outside, but Death and destruction brought about by invisible lines you could only dream of (as the mighty already did) determined that the food must now be brought *inside* at any cost. Now what? Your stupid ass is outside where somehow there isn't any food. The solution is a simple one, thanks to our own visionaries and fellow unhoused pioneers: We are going to go inside and bring the food back outside.
I was elected by the other four to go get the inside food and, through sheer bodily force of will and tweaker agility, make it outside food again. Easier said than done.
We reached the conclusion that I should go by a glorified cursory glance at the overall physical makeup of the group. I am a drug addict, absolutely, and my genetic disposition to fear has not yet been eroded entirely by use of amphetamines, which is a bad thing at this specific avenue at this specific point in time. Which may give you pause if I'm the only thing standing between you and hunger, I get that, I'm not mad at you, but if you were in this situation we could either give you drugs until you're brave or alternatively wait until you're hungry enough and watch fear shed neatly off the ketotic mass like water does a duck. We don't have drug money right now - we don't have any money at all, actually. We are going to starve to death. Unless:
The plan goes like this. I walk into the soon-to-be-victimed spot (a grocery store) and I take the inside food up off the inside and run the inside food back-ways out back into the outside so it's outside again, and then we are going to survive another three or four days off the then-inside-now-outsided outside food. It's almost guaranteed.

Unless.

Yes, I'm afraid to tell you our town had only three grocery stores within "walking" distance. No buses, no cars, too dirty to hitchhike, too nervous to kill. This means we are all painfully and intimately known entities to the employees, owners, and the newly christened "loss prevention" whose entire job is to make sure the only way we can eat is in a jail cell. What's a girl to do? The answer was watch The Hurt Locker on DVD.
My squatmate's dad saw the Hurt Locker on TV and liked it so much that he tried to reconnect with his son by inviting him over to watch it. Naturally five of us are watching this piece of shit movie and the only thing I could remember is seeing Jeremy Renner in his dipshit anti-bomb astronaut suit and thinking damn we have to do this. We all pile into our friend's dad's van and begin the drive to KROGER('s).
It's January in the midishwest and it's cold, which is normal. What's also normal in January is wearing layers and layers of clothing. What is abnormal is keeping those on once you're inside a heated building, which means that there are two elements to this heist: disguise, as well as time. The crew wraps me in many a jacket and cargo pants and sends me inside to push a cart. Pushing a cart - an industry term - if you're unfamiliar, is when you push a cart.
It was going great. I waved at everybody. Everybody waved back. Everyone is your friend when you're normal. Nobody knows you fuck for housing and eat out of the garbage. Nobody knows you're committing a felony level amount of food theft right now.
I thought of Christ to steady my pounding heart as I put 30 apples into my shopping cart like a fucking weirdo. For some reason my mind drifted to my ex-girlfriend and how she had a crayon drawing on the wall of her childhood bedroom of the Challenger rocket exploding and a bunch of crying faces in thought bubbles coming off of the rocket mid-explosion. What a fucked up thing for a child to draw. What a maniac- Oh, that's LP. Ah shit, I don't look normal. I look like a homeless guy but in more clothes. Right. Right, right, right.
My neck breached the fog of war and there was I, literally slamming my cart into this guy's crotch because of how nervous and out of it I was. I think he was saying "hey there, buddy" when I got his ass and then he screamed and put his hand behind him like he was grabbing a gun so I yelled and shoved the cart forward more and I guess he just tripped over his own feet because he fell backwards and I just tried to push it past him, but because his legs were now under it I was just kind of doing some low level vehicular homicide, high level assault with a not very deadly weapon, type shit. I kept trying to pick it up and push it over him, but he kept kicking and rolling around, acting like he was caught under tank treads in 1938 France, so it just looked like he was being killed slowly while steadily being dragged towards the store entrance under my shopping cart. The exit was maybe fifteen feet out, and I'm having a panic attack so I just shove the cart hard enough to clear his legs and booked it for the sliding doors.
My guy, the world's bravest security guard, thinks he's lost his legs I guess because he's now threatening to shoot me and I have no idea if that's a possibility or not because I didn't actually see a gun, so I naturally capitulate to the adrenaline hitting my fear-addled little rat-like tweaker brain with a hammer, sending me running, legs numb. I was about six inches through the doors when I ended up rotating my body forward on the handle of the cart, slamming my face into the groceries.
The carts wheels have locked. They lock now. Nobody told me this could happen. I've never experienced it before. It's happened since, I know what to do now, you just lift the back wheels off the ground and shove, or pick up the whole cart if you're double-teaming it with a beloved friend, but none of this knowledge was gifted to me by God in that moment, probably due to the nature of the act.
All I could think in that moment in my several-days-into-hunger-and-withdrawals haze was that having the cart lock on you feels like how that teacher must have felt getting blown up aboard the Challenger, and that a child should do a crayon drawing of this, frowny faces scribbled on the apples and rotisserie chickens in my monster shopping cart.
So I drag the cart onto the iced over concrete, and I drag it through the snow, and I drag it over to where the van is parked, and my friends get out and we turn it sideways and dump the food into the back and go home, which is outside, and we eat the outside food that once was inside, and three days later when we run out of food we do it again, just at a different Krogers.