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We drove home for Christmas in 2006

The five of us had just driven, we drove, the same distance two of us had flown,
we drove for thirty hours, and we flew for four hours, over the same route from
Washington, D.C. to Denver. Five of us drove together across along the 40th
parallel on Interstate Highway 70, for 30 hours, to cover the same territory it took
us to fly three and a half hours last week., and the same it took the wagon trains
of the 11800 nineteen weeks to cover….

In The Waffle House at one end of the gastronomic tube of our journey from D.C.
to Denver, to the McDonald’s in Colby, Kansas that formed its cloacae
smorgasbord of fast food, a feast of fast, maybe it should be called, like a pride of
crows, a famine of fast food factories, or an infestation of fast food outlets, or a
travesty of convenience restaurants, it is not a great sign for American gustatory
pride, gourmandic industry, that such is the state of American food on the
outskirts of each and every city of our country, that the choices devolving to
Burger King, McDonalds Waffle House, I Hop, Cracker Barrel, Kentucky Fired
Chicken, Taco Bell, Taco John, and Subway, with a Quizno’s or two popping up
its …mmmm, Tasty red an green signs here and there. The highway 70, and, I
am sure, the highways 1-95 that crosshatch and interline our country provide a
faster way to get from place to place, straight lines through a curved time and
space, but also provide homogeneity a way to proliferate. There is scant
difference between east and west north and south when it comes to the urban
landscapes of its entryway, the ribbon of commerce that forms the tongue and
tail of our urban beasts from Manchester to Miramar, is the same, from
International Falls to Ipswich to Indianapolis to Indian River to Ithaca to I don’t
know where else, it is always the same, a mish mush of independently owned
and corporately designed eating experiences that leave one full and unfulfilled,
and that have hefted up Americans to grotesque sizes throughout the country.
The Middle West the middle waist the wasteland the Midwest the breadbaskert of
America is a doughboy, it is a wonder bread nightmare it is the essence of the
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Big Mac and The Whopper and the Double Cheese. It is frankly disgusting to
look at us, America.

We are soft and fat and flabby and flaccid and obese and orotund and rotund and
our shirts cannot be tucked in anymore and the ripples at our midsections cannot
be hidden from plain view, and we are sick and disgusting, the most of us who
wallow in the world of fast food and chain eateries, as bland and uninspired as a
Wal-Mart, and as bloated as a Walton.

We have not bothered to fight the war against the bulge, and we have lost it. The
avenues which lead to and from our cities are crowded with bad design and bad
food and bad atherosclerosis and arterial sclerosis and diabetes and diarrhea
and constipation and gout and goiter and gastric bypass and gastrointestinal
disease and duodenal ulcer, as well as plain old indigestion, an well it should be,
since we have allowed ourselves to ingest this year

(An average American’s diet”

11 pounds or maybe 51 of white sugar, pounds of c0opongealed pork and beef
fat, butter and coffee and diet coke and pounds of lard and Tran fatty acid and
polyunsaturated and saturated fats, and all that goes with it, all the is stuffed
inside our polyester and blended Chinese clothing and our mass digested lives.
And little is the alternative, for the landscape is full of the same ReMax and
Century 21 and agents selling the same little plots of land to the same old
companies that have designed our lives, the corporate builders and the thieves
that populate our boardrooms and our managerial elite, those who scratch each
other’s backs to rob corporation of million of dollars in bonus4es for themselves
the elite who have worked so hard this year…merging and acquiring other
people’s stuff for bonuses that have reached 100 million dollar in a single
year….Company wealth at the top is doing just fine, thank you.

But Burger King is not making us rich, and it is not making its shareholders much
money, and the burger wars, when half the menus are going for a dollar, are a
little frightening even and especially when the dollar is worth so little in the
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world’s economy and the cost of our war in Iraq is $3 billion of them every two
weeks…and this is the season to be jolly

Saturday, December 23, 2006

12/23/2006 7:45:01 AM