Lots of things are dangerous. Knives are dangerous. Bears are dangerous. Women driving cars are dangerous. But I was fairly certain, until today, that freshness was fairly benign; a positive, even. Apparently I was wrong.
As I am wont to do, I went to the McDonald's Drive-Thru to get some chicken McNuggets (I love those things. They're like deep-fried crack) and some fries. Sounds boring enough, doesn't it? Well it was boring, thanks especially to the prolonged wait at the window. I know that as a sign that they're making a fresh batch of food - otherwise, there would just be an hours-old pre-made box of whatever your ordered sitting under one of those futile heating lamps. This didn't bother me because, fresh or old, McDonald's tastes exactly the same.
But then the food was done and the drive-thru attendant handed me my bag of grease-soaked, slow death-inducing deliciousness and he looked me in the eyes and solemnly said "Be careful. It's fresh". As if freshness posed a threat to my well-being. Now I can understand that nuggets and fries might be a little hotter than usual when they're right out of the fry-u-lator, but let's recall the situation: I was at the drive-thru. I still had to drive home before digging into the food. Theoretically this would give said food time to cool down. Considering how cold the interior of my car tends to be, it would be downright lukewarm by the time I got to eating it. The risk seems minimal.
I considered the potential danger if I had been an eat-in customer, diving into my fatty foodstuffs right away. Even then, though, the risk seems almost nill. I mean, really. The stuff just ain't that hot even when it's straight out of the oil. The coffee is hotter than any of the food ever gets (and bears a warning label as such). So finally I conclude that this man was not warning me about burning my fingers on my nuggets.
So, what was he talking about then? After careful thought all I can assume is that he was warning me against freshness itself. This food must have been too close to it's original form. It had not been processed and by-processed enough to save me from the very real danger of eating something actually resembling chicken and potatoes.
It's official folks: Real food is just too dangerous for us.
And really, think about it. We live in a society that thrives almost entirely on processed products. We don't eat organic food all that much, and in fact if we did try it it would be so foreign to our systems that we might go into some kind of shock. Craving trans-fats, saturated fats, batter and salt, our bodies would seize up when actual meat or veggies were consumed. The stomach would reject them, leading to terrible illness. Can you imagine if one of those millions of obese Americans (yours truly included) ate an apple or a piece of free-range chicken? We'd fall into fits of retching and vomiting. Our muscles might cramp, leaving us to fall paralyzed to the floor, where we would helplessly drown in our own health-food spew. It would be tragedy on a widespread scale as yet unparalleled in the annals of human history. It would be like introducing breadcrumbs to the air filtration system of a spaceship: doom and catastrophe would follow from such callous tinkering with such delicate and finely-tuned equipment.
So thank you, McDonald's drive-thru man, for warning me of the freshness of my food. Of course, the process of becoming McNuggets and french fries had removed the food from it's true form sufficiently enough that I could offset it with a tall glass of coke and lots of generic brand mustard that was a color of no mustard I'd ever seen before. And it sure tasted fake. Ultimately, I got through the meal safely, and came out of it full. And it's all because McDonald's really cares.
12/31/07
12/30/07
The Concept of "People People": Why It's Bullshit, and How it is Ruining Our Lives
I don't believe in such a thing as "people people". You know, those douchebags who pretend to love nothing more than human interaction? They say that the best thing in the whole wide world is spending time with other people. Fuck those people. If you're one of them, fuck you too. Why? Because you're lying, I know it, and I hate liars.
No one is a "people person". No one in this world likes hanging around other people. Even their friends. I have friends, and they will tell you plainly: I don't hang out. We send messages over the internets, sometimes, and that's as far as it goes. Why? Because I can do it online. Doing things online is quick and easy. You can get it out of the way and then get back to the productive shit in life. If you hang out you have to fill time because no one hangs out for two minutes. Oh no, we humans have a minimum of seemingly at least an hour for hanging out. If you meet at a restaurant or bar, you're their for an hour because the service industry is full of slow ass people and it takes that long for your food and/or drinks to come to you. If you meet at your house or your friend's house, you don't want to seem like you can't stand to be there, so you stay that long to show you can endure it, and it can't be that bad.
And thusly, when you hang out you waste lots of time. All you really want to do is say hi, hear how life's been since you last met, and that's it. Realistically that takes five minutes of talking, or two of typing. I'll take two of typing. And once the two minutes are done, I'm free again to do as I please. Sure, what I please is mindless internet surfing, masturbation, and pro-wrestling, but hey, they please me and therefore, I'd like to experience them and maximize the amount of time dedicated to doing so in a given day.
I think everyone is like that on a basic level. I mean, you know, we all have different interests, but there you go: replace the internets, stroking it, and body slams with whatever you like and the above paragraph suits you. So why, then, are there persons pretending to be "people people"? Simple: it comes down to not wanting to be rude. So many of my fellow humans are utterly terrified of the thought that someone else would think them to be rude. You don't want someone to think you don't care about their BS, do you? You don't want someone thinking you have personal interests.
But why? Why do you care? You do realize, don't you, that you're going to die some day? And once that happens, you have officially run out of time to fulfill your personal wants. You have to achieve those things before you die, and you may as well use all the time you have. Anything else is a waste of life, and life's too precious a commodity to waste. You need to stop wasting time placating others. If you don't care about someone else's crap (and I know you don't care, ever. No one does because we all hate each other, if we're being totally honest), just tell them as much and then move on. With your death and that other person's death, the whole slew of people who actually care that you were callous are gone and your slight is forgotten forever. It's not so bad, really.
Now there are people living in denial who'll read this and tell themselves that I'm all wrong because they're the exception to the rule. Truth is they aren't an exception, they've just deluded themselves to an extraordinarily sad degree. Others will read this and see I'm right, and they'll take my advice. And soon, we'll live in a world almost completely devoid of human interaction, and that will be glorious. It will be quiet and it will be efficient, for no longer will we slow ourselves down with the burden of anyone else's emotional baggage.
Not even God himself could conceive a utopia such as that. After all, assuming his existence, he put us here and has been dealing with us all ever since. Poor fool ain't got time to stroke the Schlong Almighty.
No one is a "people person". No one in this world likes hanging around other people. Even their friends. I have friends, and they will tell you plainly: I don't hang out. We send messages over the internets, sometimes, and that's as far as it goes. Why? Because I can do it online. Doing things online is quick and easy. You can get it out of the way and then get back to the productive shit in life. If you hang out you have to fill time because no one hangs out for two minutes. Oh no, we humans have a minimum of seemingly at least an hour for hanging out. If you meet at a restaurant or bar, you're their for an hour because the service industry is full of slow ass people and it takes that long for your food and/or drinks to come to you. If you meet at your house or your friend's house, you don't want to seem like you can't stand to be there, so you stay that long to show you can endure it, and it can't be that bad.
And thusly, when you hang out you waste lots of time. All you really want to do is say hi, hear how life's been since you last met, and that's it. Realistically that takes five minutes of talking, or two of typing. I'll take two of typing. And once the two minutes are done, I'm free again to do as I please. Sure, what I please is mindless internet surfing, masturbation, and pro-wrestling, but hey, they please me and therefore, I'd like to experience them and maximize the amount of time dedicated to doing so in a given day.
I think everyone is like that on a basic level. I mean, you know, we all have different interests, but there you go: replace the internets, stroking it, and body slams with whatever you like and the above paragraph suits you. So why, then, are there persons pretending to be "people people"? Simple: it comes down to not wanting to be rude. So many of my fellow humans are utterly terrified of the thought that someone else would think them to be rude. You don't want someone to think you don't care about their BS, do you? You don't want someone thinking you have personal interests.
But why? Why do you care? You do realize, don't you, that you're going to die some day? And once that happens, you have officially run out of time to fulfill your personal wants. You have to achieve those things before you die, and you may as well use all the time you have. Anything else is a waste of life, and life's too precious a commodity to waste. You need to stop wasting time placating others. If you don't care about someone else's crap (and I know you don't care, ever. No one does because we all hate each other, if we're being totally honest), just tell them as much and then move on. With your death and that other person's death, the whole slew of people who actually care that you were callous are gone and your slight is forgotten forever. It's not so bad, really.
Now there are people living in denial who'll read this and tell themselves that I'm all wrong because they're the exception to the rule. Truth is they aren't an exception, they've just deluded themselves to an extraordinarily sad degree. Others will read this and see I'm right, and they'll take my advice. And soon, we'll live in a world almost completely devoid of human interaction, and that will be glorious. It will be quiet and it will be efficient, for no longer will we slow ourselves down with the burden of anyone else's emotional baggage.
Not even God himself could conceive a utopia such as that. After all, assuming his existence, he put us here and has been dealing with us all ever since. Poor fool ain't got time to stroke the Schlong Almighty.
12/29/07
I'm Twenty and Distressingly Old
I'm of the opinion that oldies stations on the radio should play old music. Many of you (all of you) would support me in this and you're probably wondering why I wasted space, time, and keystrokes on that statement. But give me a minute. It needed to be said, believe it or not.
Last night I was driving home from a family dinner and since I hate the crushing silence of a car without the radio on, I pushed the knob on the dashboard and selected number three on my presets list: the local Golden Oldies station. While I, myself, am quite young at the tender age of Twenty years, I enjoy music of pretty much any era prior to the current one, filled as it is with useless rap and a pathetic imitator of "pop". I like listening to the Beach Boys, or Bobby Fuller, or Aretha Franklin, or any other luminary of the fifties and sixties from time to time and I've come to know this radio station as a host of such music. That said, I also like the seventies, eighties, and nineties and have radio stations catering to those needs set to other numbers on the display.
Imagine, if you will, the utter bewilderment I experienced when I turned on the home of "California Girls" and was met with "Little Red Corvette", a song from 1983! A damn fine song, too, but that's not the point. The point is that the Golden Oldies station apparently decided that the fifties and sixties, the Beach Boys and the Temptations, were officially too old to be considered "golden" oldies. I guess they're bronze oldies now, relegated to some iffy on-and-out AM signal. In their place are the seventies (Norman Greenbaum's "Spirit in the Sky" followed "Corvette") and eighties (Hall and Oates' "Kiss on My List" followed "Spirit"). Like I said, I like these eras (indeed, I have a slightly unhealthy fascination with the eighties that will surely make it self evident in due time on this site), but now I no longer have the option of two other decades I liked.
Well, OK, I could probably find that mythic AM signal (but fuck that, AM is hardly listenable with it's tinny, other-end-of-the-tunnel sound quality), or go on the internets and find a true oldies station (though that would do me no good in the car), but I still find this whole thing distressing for another reason: This means that the seventies and eighties are officially old. I was born in the Eighties (the tail end - 1987 - admittedly). Does this make me old, too? I can't imagine being old. In fact, I've more than once sworn to myself that I would commit suicide if natural causes didn't claim me before I hit forty, which isn't even half-way to the average life expectancy these days!
Despite popular belief of the opposite, being old is bad. A tragedy, I would dare say. You're outdated and pretty much worthless for any task other than wasting air us young'uns could be breathing, and slowing us down on the highways and byways of this Earth with your horrendous driving. Everyone who isn't old resents everyone who is, whether we admit it or not. It's just a universal truth, bred into our genes over time. After all, an insane love for the elderly would have been bad for our evolution progress - the young and virile would be eaten because they'd stick behind to help the oldest pack members escape the stampede of elephants or whatever. Meanwhile, the ones who resented the elderly just saved themselves and went on to make babies. In today's world, people who tolerate the elderly face problems like changing grandpa's depends or going ten MPH on the freeway because Grammy wanted to drive today, and then you're just horribly late for everything for the rest of the day. It's just simple logic: being old, or caring for the old, is a negative. And I don't need negatives. I haven't the time for them, being half-way to my self-set life cutoff point. I only have time for positives, like getting where I'm going on time and moving on from WW2 already.
But here I come back to the issue of that cutoff point. When I set it (in the before time, when fucking Stan Bush wasn't a golden oldie), forty seemed old enough because I'd still be technically young, and I would have had a lot of time to do what I wanted to. While the latter point remains true, the former, I fear, may not. If things from the decade of my birth are already old, then I'll be downright ancient by the time forty comes.
To me, this is a dilemma worthy of much consideration and debate. This, I think, should give you a good idea of what kind of person I am, and act as decent introduction to this blog.
Last night I was driving home from a family dinner and since I hate the crushing silence of a car without the radio on, I pushed the knob on the dashboard and selected number three on my presets list: the local Golden Oldies station. While I, myself, am quite young at the tender age of Twenty years, I enjoy music of pretty much any era prior to the current one, filled as it is with useless rap and a pathetic imitator of "pop". I like listening to the Beach Boys, or Bobby Fuller, or Aretha Franklin, or any other luminary of the fifties and sixties from time to time and I've come to know this radio station as a host of such music. That said, I also like the seventies, eighties, and nineties and have radio stations catering to those needs set to other numbers on the display.
Imagine, if you will, the utter bewilderment I experienced when I turned on the home of "California Girls" and was met with "Little Red Corvette", a song from 1983! A damn fine song, too, but that's not the point. The point is that the Golden Oldies station apparently decided that the fifties and sixties, the Beach Boys and the Temptations, were officially too old to be considered "golden" oldies. I guess they're bronze oldies now, relegated to some iffy on-and-out AM signal. In their place are the seventies (Norman Greenbaum's "Spirit in the Sky" followed "Corvette") and eighties (Hall and Oates' "Kiss on My List" followed "Spirit"). Like I said, I like these eras (indeed, I have a slightly unhealthy fascination with the eighties that will surely make it self evident in due time on this site), but now I no longer have the option of two other decades I liked.
Well, OK, I could probably find that mythic AM signal (but fuck that, AM is hardly listenable with it's tinny, other-end-of-the-tunnel sound quality), or go on the internets and find a true oldies station (though that would do me no good in the car), but I still find this whole thing distressing for another reason: This means that the seventies and eighties are officially old. I was born in the Eighties (the tail end - 1987 - admittedly). Does this make me old, too? I can't imagine being old. In fact, I've more than once sworn to myself that I would commit suicide if natural causes didn't claim me before I hit forty, which isn't even half-way to the average life expectancy these days!
Despite popular belief of the opposite, being old is bad. A tragedy, I would dare say. You're outdated and pretty much worthless for any task other than wasting air us young'uns could be breathing, and slowing us down on the highways and byways of this Earth with your horrendous driving. Everyone who isn't old resents everyone who is, whether we admit it or not. It's just a universal truth, bred into our genes over time. After all, an insane love for the elderly would have been bad for our evolution progress - the young and virile would be eaten because they'd stick behind to help the oldest pack members escape the stampede of elephants or whatever. Meanwhile, the ones who resented the elderly just saved themselves and went on to make babies. In today's world, people who tolerate the elderly face problems like changing grandpa's depends or going ten MPH on the freeway because Grammy wanted to drive today, and then you're just horribly late for everything for the rest of the day. It's just simple logic: being old, or caring for the old, is a negative. And I don't need negatives. I haven't the time for them, being half-way to my self-set life cutoff point. I only have time for positives, like getting where I'm going on time and moving on from WW2 already.
But here I come back to the issue of that cutoff point. When I set it (in the before time, when fucking Stan Bush wasn't a golden oldie), forty seemed old enough because I'd still be technically young, and I would have had a lot of time to do what I wanted to. While the latter point remains true, the former, I fear, may not. If things from the decade of my birth are already old, then I'll be downright ancient by the time forty comes.
To me, this is a dilemma worthy of much consideration and debate. This, I think, should give you a good idea of what kind of person I am, and act as decent introduction to this blog.
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