I am a willowy cuss. Calories have no effect on me. Naturally immune. Maybe the tons of Crisco ingested row out of my canal unchallenged.
There used to be a regular salad bar at an unnamed wholesome blase' family restaurant in McKees Rocks. Not badly attended. Holes like McKees Rocks can reveal that stations in life are analogous. Everyone was used to a town in long standing decline. I went to indulge a fried chicken thing.
I need to eat huge amounts of it to be alright, and I don't care why. The joint ran a Sunday brunch golconda that included fantastic fried chicken, en mass, and it's partner in coronaries, mashed potatoes and gravy. The gravy puts tons on some people merely thinking of it. I'm immune to ill effects of that leading cause of terminal disease. Here is why the atmosphere got thick there, one Sunday.
Me, there, getting a table and dashing like a reindeer to the chicken. I was hungry as nine roving wolverines. Too hungry to notice my very short term dining peer assembly. Not many there, lottsa' emty booths and tables, thanks, greeter, for giving me a horrible table under these circumstances, doesn't matter, there was chicken to get at. The plate loading process went fine, no competition, round one of my procedure was to go with chicken, straight up, second round with mashed potatoes and hazardous gravy, and it was on the hike back to my inhospitable table that I noticed morbidly obese men staring both at me, and the mile high stack of chicken I was carrying. One guy looked like he was dying of envy. Most stared at me like I was from planet Mars. All had the recent quadruple bypass look. With O2 tanks and binders like lawn furniture. I'd been riding my bicycle about a hundred fifty miles a week, and was in the condition of a low ranked marathon runner.
By the time I got back to terra Formica and tore into the fried chicken, I grasped that everyone in the room was on a medically urgent restricted diet, and I was probably the only person per square mile that wasn't. I've been eating tons of fried chicken for years, and have perfect blood pressure. The visually ugly aspect of the dining experience was easily covered with the most vital components of my being, the stuff I eat. But emotion would charge out of the flabby underbrush. There was an extremely overweight family of four, crammed in a booth, eight feet from the offending yours truly. I was upsetting a morbidly obese man. Mia culpa.
I was busy as a one armed paper hanger eating, there had been a few bad food days on a lean week, the chicken was needed like air. On lean weeks I have to go to mediocre food sources I call the LDF, or 'least disgusting food.'
Go figure, first option is eggs, seems callous towards chickens, cheap protein, needed, canned garbage, and cheap ass fruit. Keeps your ass from shutting down. That's most of a bad week. Poison snack foods come into the breadth of LDF. Yonder comes this compelling hunger, and it is why I was there.
The entire family of four was busy managing their strict dietary needs. All were restricted to foods eighty miles lower down the trench than fried chicken and it's high calorie friends. The mrs was busy explaining to the two kids, wide as retaining walls, why they were not allowed to have what they wanted, and would have to get used to eating things they hate. The mrs is to be complimented for dealing with it fine, good work, good caring, good show of maturity, she conveyed authority in the least harmful way, she's a saint. She outlined consequences for non-compliance, like no best loved cartoon video later. No exotic tortures were threatened by either parent. Bravo, modern family health care. The kids were horrible. But I might not have noticed as much, though they were audible like a large home entertainment center, the mr, wide as an industrial freezer, kept staring at me, turning his huge truculent square compressed head, with a homicidal rage. I could read the hatred like a Dick Tracy cartoon. Built in cubes, the gent looked like the squad leader of a Bosnian hired army. Deposed aristocrats come to the US, and forty years later their grand kids are assistant managers at the auto parts store. This could also explain the guy, not that it needed clarification. Looked like a pugnacious cuss who was trying to be a modern good parent.
It was a bountiful and lethal-to-some all you can eat buffet, requiring several trips hither/tither, food runs. Not my fault again I had to pass their booth, both directions to and fro the trough. Each time I went by with a load of mashed potatoes and gravy, the two kids, he and she, stared at it and begged mom and pop to let them have them. The kids looked at me like they'd kill me to get at fried chicken and the side key to bliss. Quite a hassle for both over taxed parents. Since it was a repeat performance each time I went back to the feast spread, the kids would start crying and begging again, and the mr would give me the look, it's my fault he has to manage his homicidal rage. The mrs was too well focused to notice outsiders. I really admire her for her good character. Mr, on the other hand, was distracted by limpid bike riding nimrods.
He hated my scrawny, chicken eating guts, and I was half empathetic. When he wasn't staring at me like I'd stolen his native country's equivalent of the holy grail, he was supporting his spouse's efforts to calm the kids and direct their attention to positive health care goals, like losing weight and getting healthier. I was empathetic on that one, too. That's a chickenshit incentive to tolerate boredom and blandness. Restricted diets are all LDFs, and those with morbid obesity are under doctor's orders to chow down small portions of nothing but LDFs. Not my fault. The man has no right to hurt me for pigging out like a razorback hog, and for providing him the reflection of things obesity and family life took from him, like a mile high stack of fried processed farm bird. He wanted to kill the image of freedom, like killing the bearer of bad news, and inside an hour I was done eating and out of there. Sated.
Empathy is radiant, even in minor dessert portions and reduced calorie condiments. I needed fried chicken more than enough to blow off the animosity I sensed in that blase' formica dining area. I wasn't worse off, the dining experience wasn't my worst, the expense, aside from the extra-ordinary peer opprobrium, was reasonable. I was reminded I had it easier than many for not having any kids, and for having real good general health, minus a spoke in the money making part of the brain. No one pays me to excel at the triple jump. I don't earn much, ever, but I've got my weasily health. I'm a little smug. They got problems. And have to eat LDFs. I understand how they felt.
All kinds of religion in McKees Rocks. Unusual Baltic clans. Many of them look like the mr, like the under paid manager at an outlet store, dressed in his super-large Sunday suit and dark rep tie. All kinds of cutting crumby people some slack for being imperfect. One needn't believe anything to cut other people some slack. One can believe anything, and go easy on everyone. We're modern.
No comments:
Post a Comment