|
SubscriptionsSites I Read
|
|
|
|
| Four reasons why I hate Texas Roadhouse:
1.) Country Music.
Three-minute ballads about straw hats, rose pedals, trucks, and
barnyards are not appealing. Country music epitomizes the
ever-increasing stupidity that is overtaking America. Singers are
'proud' to be country, which in essence means proud to take less
frequent showers than everyone else, proud to have no creative outlet
other than driving in the mud, and proud of bad grammar. It means being
proud of having a Confederate flag in your yard. The Civil War ended
over a century ago. No one gives a shit about slavery anymore.
2.)
The Waiting Room. Everyone is so eager to get into to this place that
they stuff themselves in like sardines and crowd-surf to the
receptionist to give their name. Once this has been established, they
either stand in each others' body odor until their name is called or
they walk over to Target to buy cheap shit because it looks 'creative.'
3.)
Peanuts. The fat-ass sterotypical American can't wait to get started
putting on weight. That's why they feed us with a troph full of peanuts
and allow us to munch away. Where should we put the shells? Hell, just
toss them on the floor. Nothing could be more unsanitary. Petsmart has
to deal with dog shit, yet they have a cleaner floor. And since the
peanuts weren't enough, they give you another bucket-full once you're
seated. On top that, you're provided with buttery, calorie-filled
rolls. And once we drop our saliva-filled peanut shells into the
bucket, they empty it out and give it to another unsuspecting family of
five.
4.) Birthdays. Everyone lies about their birthday. They
just want the big hat and the free cake. Honestly, it pisses everyone
else off to hear the obnoxious singing of the waitresses. Go celebrate
somewhere else.
5.) The Food. It tastes like roadkill that they
fried up on the grill that probably isn't clean. Oh wait, there's
something on the menu with the word 'roadkill' in it. And the macaroni?
Straight from the box. I don't understand why people eat here.
I guess that's five. Congratulations, Texas Roadhouse. You've outdone yourself. | | |
| The feeble woman behind the register looked through me with eyes that
seemed as if they had been through three or four world wars. With
terror trembling in her voice she said "6-6-6." Momentarily baffled, I
looked around in dismay. "Uhhh... is that the price?" She nodded in
reply, "It's just a number just like any other number," she tried to
put me at ease, probably because of the look I can only imagine was on
my face. I'd decided that if it were like 'any other number,' she
wouldn't have tried to scare the living shit out of me like a messenger
from hell.
I picked up the bag, its contents laughing at me
from inside the thin sheet of plastic. Three trips to the hardware
store had finally placed a can of paint thinner and an abrasion cloth
in the passenger seat of my Jeep. I played some angry music on the way
home, hoping that it could decrease the feelings that can only come of
spending four hours trying to strip the paint off of a door. I pulled
into the driveway.
My dad, having burned a garbage bag full of
old bank statements the night before in a steel wood-burner, was now
standing in the yard emptying the ashes into a garbage bag. I watched
intently, commenting on the gaping hole that had burned into the bottom
of the bag and was now releasing the ashes back onto the grass in our
backyard. Before I could point out his mistake, he shouted "Goddamnit."
He knew what he had done. He looked me in the eye, one hand holding the
garbage bag and the other holding the steel wood-burner and said "We
need something metal to put this in." I looked at him and said "How
about that metal thing in your hand." I grabbed some shovels. After we
had cleaned up his messed, I headed back to my door. I looked over my
shoulder and asked, "Did you learn anything?" just as he had asked me
after every mistake that riddled my childhood. He scoffed.
My
mother had spotted a knick in the bathroom door just days earlier.
Expecting an easy, two-step process of stripping and re-staining, I
volunteered to remove three doors from the upstairs hallway and
re-stain them all. I honestly don't know why.
After inhaling
some Citristrip, waking up at 11 am didn't bother me so much anymore. I
began to apply the stripper to the inside of the closet door, hoping to
be done by 3. Three o'clock rolled around, and I was still obsessing
over the residue that the Citristrip had left. The door didn't look
like it was made out of wood anymore. At this point, I actually don't
know if it's wood at all. The house was built in 1910. Did they have
anything besides wood back in 1910? Did they have doors? They didn't
have Kraft Macaroni and Cheese, so as far as I'm concerned, they were
cavemen.
I sanded it down. It didn't work. I applied paint
thinner. It didn't work. I kicked it. Still nothing. After six tedious
hours of leaning over this door in my garage that was clearly cursed by
the underworld, I acted out of desperation. I found the nearest looking
stain in my basement, and I stained right over the mess that I had
concocted out of what was now barely a door.
The door is now in
my garage, and it's still sticky. It can remain like that for all of
eternity, because tomorrow I'm re-attaching it to my closet regardless.
My dad looked at me in the eye after a full hellish day of frustration
and asked, "Did you learn anything?" I scoffed at him.
| | |
| I knew Tuesday was destined to be terrible. I knew this the first time
I tumbled down a hill with a weed-whacker in my hands, the kind that
can cut your fingers off if you're not careful, and by not careful I
mean allowing yourself to roll down a hill with it. What I wasn't aware
of, however, was how extraordinarily bad things would soon become.
Covered in sweat, grass, and oil, I returned from my lunch break
satisfied that every hill in the school district now had shorter, more
aesthetically pleasing grass. As I picked rocks out of my legs, Ken
asked Alex, Greg and I to take a few things to the dumpster for the
science teachers at the Jr. High. We began our journey.
This
journey soon became the wet dream of every adolescent with pent-up
aggression of any kind. What they were asking us to do, in essence, was
to take computer monitors, towers, glass jars, beakers, test tubes, and
other such things and hurl them into the dumpster. I became excited.
I cracked a monitor off of the corner of the dumpster, and smiled as
the glass burst onto the pavement. A few old people watched us from
their back porch. They were obviously jealous. Eventually I saw
something in the bottom of the box that would disgust most people, but
excited me. I watched the cow's brain explode as I hurled it in the
back of the dumpster. This was inching toward the greatest day of my
life.
Upon one of the last trips to the science hall to remove
more garbage, I remembered what the one teacher told us, "Be careful
with that bin there. It has squids in it. They smell terrible." I took
this into account when I set the bin on the edge of the cart and told
Greg not to make any sudden stops.
The next second of my life,
ultimately, seemed like it lasted about four minutes. As Greg made the
sudden stop that I know you know he made, I watched the bin tilt. This
thing had to be at least a 4 gallon container. As it tilted, I screamed
the word "Nooooooo." It felt like a movie, except terrifying. Around
the third minute of the time continuum, the bin hit the floor. I
reached out to stop it, and I watched every single individual droplet
of formaldehyde cover my arms, the floor, and the squid.
I
stared in dismay for several seconds. What was the protocol for
something like this? The entire hallway instantly smelled like seafood.
My arms would for days. Still do, in fact. I knew we had to clean the
rug. I wasn't sure how, and I was determined to not get caught.
Alex's first words were something along the lines of "We're fired.
This isn't my fault. I had nothing to do with this." I muttered some
obscenities as he walked away. My initial instinct of cowardly
selfishness was to blame it on Greg for stopping the cart. I knew it
was my fault, I should have just carried it. But I blamed it on Greg.
I carried the squids to their final resting place, the dumpster, still
trying to devise a gameplan to get away with this. The science teacher
wasn't lying when she said they smelled terrible. It was hot that day,
I recall, and within minutes the dumpster smelled like that little room
you first walk into when you go to the China House. That room smells
like piss. I don't know why they don't air it out. But that's beside
the point.
The next two hours involved about a dozen pairs of
latex gloves, four different bottles of chemicals, bleach, a broom,
three bags of the pine shit they put on vomit, a vacuum cleaner, a mop
and bucket, a few gallons of soapy water, a squeegee, and just about
anything else we could conceivably find in the maintenance shed that
would remedy a situation like this. After deciding that, if you looked
at the carpet from a certain angle, with the sun shining just the right
way through the window, that you almost couldn't see the stain, we went
back to work and acted like nothing happened. As we washed our hands,
Greg exhaustedly shouted "I was going to wear these pants tomorrow, but
now they smell like oil and calamari!"
Just for the record, I
traveled to the deserted wasteland that is the third floor of the Jr.
High several weeks after the accident. The smell is still unbearable.
You can barely see the stain, though. | | |
| The worst part of my day. I never see it coming. It's never good. I
never know what to expect, but I always know that for those few
split-seconds, I will experience mental anguish like nothing else that
exists in this world.
Maybe it's when I see that kid holding the
door. Yeah, that kid. I'm ten yards behind, I'm not even near him. But
he's holding the door for me. I have to hurry. I have to shuffle. I
have to do something I don't want to do to appease this guy. This is
frustrating. Or how about when that person is just far enough behind me
that I'm not sure if I should hold the door until they get it or just
push it open far enough so that when they get there it's still slightly
open for them to finish opening it themselves. Why is it so hard for
people to open the door for themselves? But there's me with my I-Pod in
my ears, that asshole walking in front of you, the guy that could not
give a shit less, and he doesn't hold the door. You hate that kid,
don't you? I guess I don't want to be that kid. Although deep down I
don't care.
Or how about when someone walks on the left side.
They're walking on the left side and they look at you with indignity,
and you don't know why. They're in your way. That's how life works,
buddy, you have to walk on the right, not the left, yet you're in my
way and you're pissed at me for being where I'm supposed to be. Now I
feel like shit. Thanks. I hate you.
And then there's the wave.
The wave. You both look up at each other as you walk toward each other
and you're 20 yards apart. Too early for a wave, isn't it? Better look
down and pretend that look didn't happen. Until you're right next to
each other and then you have to wave because it's customary even though
you only met once, you don't really know his name, and you didn't even
like him in the first place. Doesn't make sense. But wait, he doesn't
wave at all. That son of a bitch.
And then there's the
hallway. The girl who is walking right for you and you step to the
left, she steps to the left, to the right, to the right, it goes on for
what seems like forever, but your vocal chords weren't prepared to say
anything so it comes out like 'uhhumcuseme.' Does she even know you
meant excuse me? I guess it doesn't matter.
Then there's the
bump. The guy who's walking around the corner and he bumps you because
he wasn't looking where he was going, and that's just the worst. Unless
you see that girl that you hooked up with once that you never thought
was attractive in the first place so instead of putting yourself
through that awkward split-second of eye contact you walk literally a
quarter of a mile out of the way because you don't want to see her.
Yeah, I've done that.
And yes I will walk intentionally slow
when I'm behind someone at a distance where they might just hold the
door for me. Yes I will look into the reflection of the door and if
they're not right behind me and I mean right behind me I will not hold
that door. And yes when I'm accidentally on the left side where I
shouldn't be, I will give the other person an indignant look anyway.
And I absolutely hate having to say excuse me. | | |
|
