7/8/08

Meat Howitzer

Sweet Jesus, I really, really, really want a cheeseburger.

The fast food in this city is epochally, apocalyptically terrible, though. If I had to guess, I'd say they only make new food on Tuesdays, and they only serve you the stuff from last Tuesday, which they have left to rest on top of a dehumidifier to make sure that, if bacteria is going to fester, it's not so much bacteria. I always feel like Michael Douglas in Falling Down, when he goes into the fast food place with the Mac-10 and complains that his burger doesn't look like the one in the picture. Except I don't have that haircut, and I'm not being directed by Joel Schumacher (thank Christ).

Otherwise, I'm more or less just like Michael Douglas in Falling Down, and Robert Duvall won't stop stalking me.

The only place that's given me a halfway decent dead animal is Burger King, and I've only gone there once. I tried to go there again, but some bastard in a '79 Granada was taking up both lanes of the drive through entrance, and then I thought I though the next street was one-way but it actually wasn't, and before you know it, just like that, I was on the interstate like whoa, how did I end up on the interstate? And I'm fiddling with my GPS thing, trying to turn it on and program it to take me to "Points of Interest: Burger King" with 94% of my attention span, the rest being devoted to not sideswiping yourself or someone like you. (Shoutout to Matchbox 20!) But somehow, in the twists and turns of the streets of this city -- which I swear to God was laid out by an autistic monkey with a broken copy of Sim City DS -- I ended up in the parking lot of a grocery store, and left with, like, romaine lettuce and sprouts and made a salad with expired bleu cheese and a small army of those fake soy bacon bits. Which is so fucking disappointing when you're looking to get a hot injection of concentrated fats and salts in your mouth from a patty-shaped fleshcannon, a regular meat howitzer. I don't want to be the asshole who walks into Ruby Tuesday's alone and sits down at a booth and doesn't even act like he's waiting for somebody before finally breaking down and ordering a Triple Prime Burger (three different kinds of cow!). So there's really no alternative to shitty fast food, and none of it's even within walking distance.

But you know what? I'm going to fix up, look sharp, and go get myself a wad of pounded flesh that's been ripped from the corpse of a soft-eyed, headless beast while it hangs by its ankle from the ceiling of a death-factory that takes up a whole city block, then fed through a machine with teeth and gears that pulverize it into a lumpy paste, before being frozen and driven across the country and fried by a teenager who probably hasn't washed his hands since getting his girlfriend pregnant earlier this afternoon while trying out that new KY his 'n' hers.

Fuck me. The things I'm willing to do for a cheeseburger. And I don't even really want one anymore.

2 comments:

Sisyphus said...

Are you eating that cheeseburger while wearing a bacon tux? or carrying a bacon wallet? Cuz bacon is the ironic food of choice these days, you know.


So, you're back on Teh Internetz! Did you go back home for the summer or are you in the grad school location, and how the hell does one cope with humidity in either place?

D said...

Yeah, seriously, what is it with the bacon? But I did end up going to Burger King, and I bought a double whopper, and they accidentally put bacon on it. So, I guess I was sincerely, unintentionally ironic. And it was delicious.

I am back. I just basically decided that what I wanted to be a crippling case of writer's block was just me being a lazy puss. So, I dropped the ol' expectations, and here I am, in my graduate school apartment, with my graduate school friends, turning on my graduate school air-conditioning, hoping the graduate school bill doesn't break my back.