Dear organic music lovers,

Happy Christmas, or should I say, Happy Christmas season. My whole scheme during the holidays is to eat sufficiently over Thanksgiving that I don’t really need food until Christmas dinner. (Then I set myself up for New Year’s.) This ensures a certain quality of meal, and is a real money-saver, besides.

This month we look at an interesting little phenomenon, that of Grocery Separation Paranoia (GSP). At the risk of sounding Seinfeldian, I think it bears a closer look, that rabid fascination we all have with making sure our food items DO NOT TOUCH any other person’s food items on the conveyor belt at the checkout line.

Scene: You’re in line, and you’re the middle person — i.e., there’s one person ahead of you, one behind. You are deep in the incredibly gratifying pleasure of ensuring that your groceries are clearly divided — by means of a 12-inch, black plastic stick — from those groceries East and West of you.

Why is this so crucial? A few reasons; for starters, snobbery.

Simply put, I don’t like my organic edamame, my organic agave nectar and my unbleached, unenriched, unground buckwheat flour sitting next to your Aunt Jemima, High Fructose, Creme-Injected, Hydrogenated Yellow 5 Orville Corn Smackers. I don’t want the plastic container of your chemically-enhanced unfood to touch the virgin purity of my wholesome produce. Who knows how much disease and petroleum will seep from your foodstuffs into mine during the next few seconds? No, separation is absolutely necessary here.

The next reason you might call co-snobbery — that is, neither shopper wants to be associated with the other, foodwise. Your roommates would kick you out if you brought lentils home, and my wife would probably post your package of Purdue Breaded Chicken Nuggets (“Real Chicken Flavor!”) on Craigslist if I came home with it. My food is multi-colored; your food is tan. Your food is fun; mine actually requires cooking. (OK, mine wins.)

But there’s one other thing, and if you’ll pardon the highfalutin reference, I think this is what Robert Frost was getting at in his excellent poem “Mending Wall”: we LIKE being separated from each other. It’s a kind of food personal space. We need our “bit of earth,” as Mary did in the Secret Garden (pardon, again) — only it’s really more our bit of conveyor belt, isn’t it. (And I digress, but how DO those belts always know when to stop moving just before the food is going to spill onto the barcode scanner? I always catch myself holding my breath, sure that this time all my apples are going to break the sacred conveyor belt / barcode scanner fault line, overturn and scamper every which way.)

Actually, a fun way to mess with someone (maybe I need to get out more) is to load your groceries on the belt just behind your neighbor’s, but then pointedly REFUSE to separate them with the holy black divider. See how long she can take it: her face starts to twitch … she squeezes her hands together to keep under control … and finally she abandons all pretense, dives for the black thing and, with an annoyed huff, plants it firmly between the items. This is MY section of this dirty, black, sticky conveyor belt. Don’t YOU touch it, or I’ll suffocate you with my organic cotton reusable shopping bag.

Just one show this month, but it’s a killer:

COVERS SHOW with Lori McKenna and Mark Erelli, featuring the bass stylings of Zack Hickman

This show must be good, because this is our sixth year running. Lori, Mark and Zack are three of my favorite people — I think I’m supposed to call them colleagues, but they’re really friends — and we go all out at these shows. I really think it’s the excitement of the singer/songwriter who realizes he actually DOESN’T have to play his same old songs tonight. (He can play Queen, instead.) Grab a ticket for one of these — the early show is most likely sold out but there’s a later one, too, and it tends to be even more bizarre. At least, as bizarre as three folk/pop singers can get. Thursday 12/17 at Club Passim, 47 Palmer St., Harvard Square, Cambridge, MA. 7pm & 10pm.

The entire Jake Armerding Store is on SALE for Christmas — why not do a bit of “independent” shopping this year? CDs are just $9.99, album downloads only $5.99 — and if you order two or more CDs, we’ll throw in a free Jake Armerding T-shirt. (Just specify your size in the “Comments” field while ordering, and please remember sizes run wicked large.)

Have a blessed Christmas. Thank you for another crazy fun year of making music — your gracious support allows me to do what I love to, and that means everything.

Cheers to you.

Jake
JakeArmerding.com
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