Finally the guy with gun and sparklers waved me around the scene from Mad Max and I was off on a detour through an area I’d never seen.  I seemed to be headed further away from food and that vexed me tangibly.  At a stoplight I waved at a car stopped next to me.

“Hey!  Hey you in the Volkswagen!  Over here!”

The round woman driving glanced slightly my way indicating that she heard me but refused to acknowledge me waving which by now was occurring through the sunroof.

“I’m looking for nearby food, lady… can you point me in the direction of a shopping facility?”

She turned on her radio.

“Hey lady did you know the Nazis invented the Volkswagen?”

The radio went up.

“Don’t ignore me you fascist!  I’m hungry and you’re a Nazi and that means you owe me!”

The light changed and she sped off.  I was still standing in my seat with my torso protruding from the sunroof.  I stared indignantly.  Then came the horns.

The people behind me were mad and also driving a Volkswagen; the car two back was an Audi.  It was like a 4^th Reich stoplight, where’d they all come from and was it a good idea to raise their ire so early in the morning.  The yelling came next.  Holy crap there were a lot of them and they all were dressed for church.  I was out of my element, surrounded by god-fearing Nazis who were late for something and had me to scape goat.  I knew how that played out in the 40’s so I slithered back in my car with only the slightest one finger salute I could manage and stopped on the gas.  The results were not dramatic so I put the car in gear and then stepped on the gas.

“So long, you finely appointed fascists!”

Suddenly the world seemed more dangerous to me.  So far I’d had brushes with deadly calamity and well-dressed book burners.  There was no food here.  Only depravity and insult.  A pair of Golden Arches every 2 miles, but I found myself in the one geographic anomaly in the country where I can’t find fast food.  I’d have even settled for moderately paced food if I could eat it in the car.

The Nazis had thrown me off my game.

Finally on the horizon I spotted a Burger King.  I pulled into the drive thru and low and behold the breakfast ship has sailed minutes before so I was stuck eating a burger for breakfast.  I guess in the end all fast food is junk and breakfast just means junk on a biscuit instead of on a bun.  I approached the speaker after pondering the menu briefly.

“Pzzzzrt pop wzzzzzzzello would you ssshhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh value meal?”

I was fairly certain he wanted my order.  Fairly.

“I’d like one Whopper please.”

“Pertweeee shhh do you have a coupon?”

I couldn’t imagine what coupon would apply for a single hamburger, but I was feeling punchy and decided to see where it went.

“Ah, yeah… it says it’s good for one free Whopper at any Burger King, even the non-participating ones.”

“Fffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffss sir?”

“Yeah, it says I get free bacon too, but no cheese.  Don’t put any of that nasty crap on there.”

Pause.

“Squeeeeeeeeeeeeeee pull eeeeeee window.”

“Righty-o.”

I pulled up to the first window where a nice lady said there was no charge but needed my coupon.

I replied, “What coupon?” 

She mentioned that the order taker told her that I was going to have a coupon and to put it in the register.

I told her he was a liar and it was clearly a case of prejudged malice on his part.

She told me to pull to the next window.

At the next window, the guy handed me my food and asked for my coupon.

“Oh, I gave it to the girl at the first window and if she says differently it’s because she’s pissed at me for stealing her dog.”

I sped off before the processing was completed on that statement.

I was slightly giddy for my burger.  Not just because I was hungry but because I knew I had a blog post to write and it had nothing to do with food and I knew I’d end up wasting pages getting to the point.  But the point at this point was moot.  The losers at Burger King put cheese on my sandwich rendering inedible to me.  I’m sure there was a karma gnome nearby that thought that was appropriate.  I wasn’t going to let the gnome win, so I drove back around the front of the restaurant and shoved the sandwich into their mailbox.

Now I was hungry, grumpy, and so far off point that it was getting ridiculous.  Maybe I’d just have to write about the apathy of a nation and failure of an electorate on an empty stomach.  Yeah, and maybe I’m a Chinese jet pilot.

I woke up in my usual grouchy mood, pondering the notions that the country I live in isn’t the one that I have a contract with and that there should be some sort of recourse that Joe Citizen can take against said country when it fails to uphold its part of the bargain.  That’s heavy thinking before breakfast and I set down my copy of the Constitution and decided to drive off and get something to eat.  Quipping derisive comes easier on a full stomach.

It was Sunday morning and just about the time of day that the churches start their weekly meetings, plotting to overthrow the planet one good deed at a time.  On my way to the restaurant I’d have to drive past the cull-du-sac of god.  An intersection where houses of catholic gods and methodist gods met across the streets and hurled slurs and vulgarities about Martin Luther and the trinity (respectively) across the parking lots.  Today there’d be blood.

I don’t know who got the worst of it.  Methodists or Catholics.  The intersection in front of the churches was closed amidst a psychedelic light show of blue and red as cop cars and assorted emergency vehicles blocked four lanes of traffic.  I knew then that my chances of getting to the fast food establishment of choice before the dreaded change-over to lunch had passed and instead I waited like a good patriot for the guys with the guns to tell me what to do. 

After a brief look around it was plain to see that people were dead.  The police had laid out several yellow tarps in the middle of the road and the unmistakable red smears told what was under them.  What was left of two cars was being surgically altered to extract what was left of their human innards.  One of the cars had attempted to run the left turn light to get to church on time and instead bypassed the middleman and went straight to the afterlife.  Apparently the answer to “What would Jesus do?” was run the light. 

The oncoming car that hit the woe begotten church goers was headed the same direction I was.  Perhaps they, too, desired a biscuit with chicken or sausage and a nicely shaped hash brown that tasted vaguely of potato.  Had I not stopped before leaving my house to check for mail that doesn’t come on Sundays that could have been me smeared in the asphalt.  Nothing felt worse than being killed by a religious fanatic, except being killed by one accidentally and on an empty stomach… mine, not theirs.  The government had been warning me for a decade of the dangers posed by religious fanatics to everyday Americans like myself and I thought, “Your god, they’re right!”

You can put the country on what every Lifesaver color of the week alert you want and cry “havoc!” and let slip the contractors of war abroad, but something has to be done about the local threat, man.  Some freak show in the desert who hates my freedom isn’t my enemy… it’s the lead footed protestant (or catholic) in the minivan that’ll be the end of me.  They’re everywhere… white-knuckled savages on the verge of collision with vehicles both hither AND yon.

This was all well and good to have such revelations in front of a church, but it was doing me little in the way of getting something to eat.

A compassionate reader may find my lack of reverence for the recently dead motorists to be a sick display of indifference and lack of taste.  To that I must say that people die all the time, often in gruesome fashion.  As this is being written, strangers in far and near places are expiring with friends and family or alone in dark recesses.  What’s the difference whether it happens in front of me so close that I might get it on me or anonymously in the tribal regions of southern Alabama?  It doesn’t.  If you’d like to be compassionate, do so globally and equally… not just when faced with your own mortality.

I wasn’t really faced with my own mortality here… I was hungry, not dying.

I fly through the air
with the greatest of ease.
A master of navigation
like my relatives in the seas.

What am I?

You can see me, but you’ll never touch me.
You can chase me, but will never reach me.
I can bring great glory to your day,
But just as quickly I can take it away.

What am I?

I can be seen on land, or seen at sea
In either case, you’ll see little of me.
I come not in pairs, but sets of two,
And I could take an explosive toll from you.

What am I?