Happy Corndependence Day!

I steal corn.

There, I said it.

I don’t generally steal, as a rule, for the same reasons that I don’t generally lie. Not out of any moral obligation or anything, but because I’m so sure I’m going to get caught that I tend to shake and squeal, so it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy. People always suspect the sweaty, stammering girl.

Now don’t get me wrong, I have stolen in the past, but those offenses were mostly in the borrowed-and-failed-to-return department. Besides, I think that cop had it coming. What was he doing handing a girl in a leather bra a billy club, for heaven’s sake? So I kept it. Shame on him.


(Doesn’t it look pretty on the flowered sheets?)

But I have never deliberately, knowingly, stolen anything from a store. Not even as a kid, not even as a prank. Till now.

But I think I’m justified.

It bums me out to have to buy my corn from the supermarket, anyway. Corn – if you can’t boil a pot in the open air and cook it while it’s still attached to the stalk – really needs to be purchased from roadside stand. It should have been picked that morning, and you should eat it that night at the latest. If you want some more tomorrow, you know where it is.

But the thing about living near the ocean, and the city, is that there are not so many farms. No farms means no roadside farm stands – unless you want to drive two hours for it, which I don’t. And no roadside farms stands means poor EGE is eating supermarket corn.

(Oh sure, I could go to a farmer’s market. I could also shop at Louis Boston and summer in Provence, but I choose to spend my millions elsewhere.)

Supermarket corn comes from god-knows-where and is therefore considerably older than same-day by the time they get it, let alone whenever your sorry butt goes in to pick it up. Plus, god-knows-where changes. So if you bought good corn someplace last week, there’s no guaranteeing that it will be good today. And bad corn is for the birds. Seriously, even Girl Cat won’t eat bad corn. And Girl Cat sure do love her on-the-cob.

Anyway, it’s complicated.

A few years ago, however, I realized that when you buy your corn at the supermarket and bag it up yourself, they never count. They just inquire as to how many there are, and take your word.

So I began to steal.

Just one ear I stole, each time, and I rationalized it thus: the one I don’t pay for doesn’t even begin to make up for the dozens of bad ones that I have paid for and thrown away over the years. Also, when they ask, I say I have "a dozen" – and thirteen is a baker’s dozen, so I haven’t lied so much as left a key word out. Last but not least, if they do count and catch me, I figure I can just play dumb. “Whoops! I must have counted wrong! What an idiot I am!” See? But that has never happened.

So this time, I stole two.

And when the cashier asked how many, I said “Twelve.”

Then, I don’t know what came over me, I added “Obviously.”

Oooh, not only am I getting bold, I’m getting cheeky! Isn’t this how criminals usually wind up getting caught? Somebody stop me before I’m tossing in a “Der.”

My point is this: If you are one of the fourteen or so people coming to the AssVac for the 4th of July, there is a one in seven possibility that your ear of corn is hot. Well, they will all be hot, but yours may be kifed — clipped, grabbed, nabbed, heisted, stolen, lifted, pilfered, nicked, swiped, poached, purloined, served off the back of a proverbial truck.

A proverbial truck, I said. Not Chuck. ’Cuz yuck.

You may choose to believe whatever you like. Whatever will fill you with the spirit of your Independence Day. Me, I’m sure my independent days are numbered as it is. If the Grocery Cartel isn’t coming for me, then the Ethanol Lobby people surely will. So I’ve pre-determined that my ear of corn will be one of the Liberated, and I’ve already decided that it’s going to taste sweet.

No matter how much beer I have to drink to make it so.


Happy Corndependence Day, everybody!