Athena, Holding Your Hair, Whispering In Your Ear

For me a few are enough, one is enough, none is enough. This is not for the many, but for you. We are audience enough for each other.

One of my best friends has lived more or less alone in the same house since 1983. I lived with him for a while in the late 90's, and when I moved in I noticed some cans of chili tucked away in some glass-fronted kitchen cabinets (the kind with heavy, hard to move doors that you might use as a china cabinet). The cans were curious because they were clearly a few years old (the chili was a brand I didn't recognize, and the labels were faded), but I didn't think much about it because cans last forever, right?

I moved out in the early oughts and those cans were still there. I've been out to visit many times over the intervening 20 years, and occasionally I'd spot one of those same cans and I'd joke with him about when he planned to eat them. He wrote today to say that one of the cans had sprung a leak, rotted internally, and then exploded black goo all over his cupboards. Apparently, after ~25 or 30 years, cans can go spectacularly bad!

This is just a PSA if anyone out there has a hoard of chicken chili from 1996 and hasn't made a call about what to do with it: you're running out of time!