Panic Buying Affects Us All
Panic buying. During this ongoing pandemic, everybody has seen what it does. People sweeping store shelves clean and leaving little for the next shopper in need. Fresh produce, frozen foods and most notoriously toilet paper are only a few of the products affected. It is an issue that can have an impact on anyone, and not just the ones you’d expect. To learn more, last night in my dreams we interviewed the Cold God Zangrezeb, the Unutterer of Words. While it has traditionally been a deity associated with unsettling silence, it has decided that it must speak up on this issue. Note that Zangrezeb communicates in terms impossible to translate to the limited human understanding of the cosmos, and as such transcribing direct quotes was not possible.
Zangrezeb does not require toilet paper, as it expels no waste on this plane of existence. However, those within its circle of contacts, whether that be family, worshippers or that spindly-armed fish man in the sewers who intones Zangrezeb’s name while he kills, the effects of the shortage on their lives ripple outwards far more than you’d expect, and it’s far more than just the obvious.
While Zangrezeb’s cultists are having difficulties keeping their facilities stocked, especially given their positions scattered through small New England towns, you never know when the consequences of an issue like panic buying might pop up. For instance, just in the past week, a ritual, which had taken eighteen full hours to perform, was ruined when a man wandered into the clearing where it was being held, apparently intent on using the ancient, shadow-haunted woodland as a bathroom. He couldn’t even be sacrificed. If he was willing to walk around that far out of the way outside, he either didn’t care about getting infected, in which case his blood could not be trusted, or he had already caught the disease and recovered, in which case he was too valuable as a source of blood transfusions. After all, making valuable medical supplies such as clean, fresh blood rarer will do nothing to bring this crisis to a swift end.
It does not stop there, either. Due to the failure of the ritual, Zangrezeb was not able to send an avatar into the world. Because of this, it was not able to visit its daughter’s birthday party. As a direct result of that, Zangrezeb’s daughter banished an entire small New England town to the Void of Salt and Howling. So think before you buy. You never know what a little greed today might mean for someone tomorrow.
On a final note, Zangrezeb made clear that the panic buying behavior of humans was deeply illogical. Substances such as toilet paper and paper towels were in short supply, while objects that every human must consume on a regular basis, such as food and mattresses and water, continued to sit on store shelves. Zangrezeb further noted that such irrationality will no longer be an issue once it fully enters our reality and replaces the human capacity for speech with love for Zangrezeb.
If you’d like to learn more about Zangrezeb and its worship, go to the place that will be whispered to you in your dreams tonight and open the box you find lying there. After that, it will all seem perfectly clear to you.
Peter Tkaczyk is a third-year writing major who has created a new type of toilet paper using the DVD art from old Barbie movies. You can reach them at [email protected].