so you can kiss goodbye to any narrative continuity this blog once had...

...and instead, I’ll just paint you a picture of a fast food evening. I’m driving through this cookie cutter town not far from the coast of Maine, packed in tight with its requisite gas stations and laundromats and lobster shacks. I drive down Main Street, a somewhat ragtag affair with October leaves and American flags strewn about the sidewalks. Night has almost fallen, but I can still read the signs. BELLYDANCING CLASS 6PM TUE DOG OBEDIENCE 6PM WED. I’m looking for a decent place to eat. It’s not forthcoming, and I’m tired, so I pull into the strip mall on the north side of town and opt for my old fail-safe. Every once in a while, I like to poison my body with a good, greasy Big Mac for dinner. It’s the most reliable meal I know; I can always count on finding it anywhere, those wide, yellow arches brightly shining my way towards familiarity. Each individual McDonalds will usually have some sort of locally specific knick-knacks hung up on the walls leading to the bathrooms. Here there is a handsome wooden sign slung on the bright yellow wall: “Old Jack’s Eatery,” it reads, “best burgers in Maine since 1912.” The rest of the restaurant, however, is comfortingly bland, universal in its facelessness, in the cheery void it evokes with its red plastic seats and yellow plastic counters, its happy meal figurines waving at you through a translucent plastic display case, the bright red ketchup dispenser with the little white cups stacked neatly nearby, and everywhere, that goddamn clown, grinning. When the robots become self-conscious and take over the world and enslave humanity, they won’t have to implant tubes into our stomachs to keep us fat until they can harvest our souls; they’ll simply keep all the McDonald’s running. Until then, however, the ketchup dispenser is still filled by a pimply red-headed teenager named Carl, and that thought always keeps me hopeful. Or at least keeps me from running out screaming.

Of course, what people come to McDonalds to do is eat, and so the heart of the operation is presumably its menu. It is here that you can get a 99-cent cheeseburger, a price simply unbeatable anywhere. Or upgrade to a three-dollar double quarter-pounder, or get a whole damn meal for just over five. You know it’s nothing but preservatives and high fructose corn syrup, you know it’ll clog your arteries and it may not even be real food at all, you know that the coke in your Extra-Value Meal is coming at the expense of some river in India and that the cow that made the beef of your Happy Meal farted so much it punched a new hole in the o-zone layer, and for all you know, the ketchup may cause birth defects in your children or something, but still, it’s the way to go. It tastes good, as long as you don’t have any pretensions, and it’s cheap, and you know it’s cheap, because it’s the same everywhere. And look around; if it does kill you, it’s going to kill everybody else too, so there won’t be anybody left to laugh. So many people can’t be wrong, and the few who do make a fuss – the tree huggers and the liberals, waving signs because they never learned to do any better work with their hands – ultimately only serve to lend the place an extra dimension of dignity. And so with a trustworthy, ironclad cheapness and a blanketing, vacuous universality, McDonalds beckons the masses. The dollar menu and its more glorified cousins are the lance of the McDonalds war machine, a formidable amour that can rumble through even the most backwoods community, slay whatever pesky local dragons lurk (like, presumably, Old Jack’s), and set up a well-ordered colony.

Tonight, however, is not a good night to eat at McDonald’s. There’s a whole boy’s soccer team in for a victory meal, so I decide to retreat to the van with its silence and its beer as soon as I acquire my food. The girl behind the counter – Kathy, according to her nametag – turns out to be a new employee, a spunky teenager vaguely resembling a fish. She’s got bug eyes and buckteeth, a goofy smile and bright yellow spiked hair awkwardly half-matted by her McDonald’s visor. There is an older employee hovering worriedly about her, watching the register screen. “Hi there!” she says cheerily. She waits for me to return her greeting, and then pipes out “welcome to McDonalds!” with such verve that I’m compelled to thank her. “What can I get ya?” I give her my order; she waves her hand over her electronic food-ordering doodad, wide eyes scanning for the right buttons and a long “uhhhhhh” escaping from between the teeth. The older woman frowns and leans in, her eyes never leaving the screen. “Ask him if he wants something to drink!” she hisses. “Oh!” Kathy says with a smile, “so, do you want something to drink?” I tell her no thanks. She grins with victory at her supervisor, who only nods at the screen.

Soon, I have my bag of goodies, and I begin to thread my way through the hordes of screaming sugar-high soccer players. Halfway to the door, I hear a shriek behind me: “bye!!” Kathy has picked me out with her bug eyes and is waving from behind the counter, almost lost in the sea of blue jerseys and yellow-uniformed coworkers hustling to feed them. Her buckteeth are bared in that same ludicrous smile. I make a point of turning fully around to return her wave and shout my thanks.

Back out in the van, I set down my dinner and breath a sigh of relief in the dark. I decide to relocate to a different part of the strip mall parking lot where I can camp out for the night. Switching on the lights, I’m met with a shock. I’ve inadvertently illuminated a whole family, my headlights beaming through the windshield of the minivan across from me. They’re all there, mom and dad in the front seat and kids in the back, some with open mouths poised at the burger, others reaching for the fries, all frozen dumb in the shock of my headlights. They looked lurid and two-dimensional and vaguely green, these strange specimens. It feels like turning on the light to a fishtank, or gazing by waterproof floodlights with all the sordid fascination of science through a little round window of a submarine. Here are the strange, sunless creatures of the deep, blinking back at this bright, inexplicable visitor.

I drive off to a nice, dark parking space and kill the lights. A whole family, eating McDonalds in the car in the dark. Who does that?? I think, biting into my Big Mac.

Of course, the robot invasion has already occurred. Here we are, the tattered human refugees, shrinking about in shadows of post-apocalypse strip mall parking lots, hiding from the neon glare of our aggressors and taking risks only to steal necessities from overturned vending machines. There are those few who still feebly fight back, boycotting products or waving signs or signing petitions or writing blogs. But in this bleak present, Kathy is the real hero of mankind. She roils in the belly of the beast, bright and unquenchable, proudly trumpeting her humanity even amidst the machines, communicating with indestructible innocence, thoughtfully refilling the ketchup dispenser.