Empty Calories

I’m walking down Miller road, a cup of coke in my hand.
A trip to 7-eleven is generally a pleasant experience, as much for the stroll there and back as for the coke. Unfortunately the walk to the 7-eleven I frequent when in Miami is littered with, well, litter, traffic is fast, and there’s no sidewalk.




Suddenly, a yellow behemoth goes hurtling by, split-second dopplered pumping bass. Ah yes, the pinnacle of dickhead engineering, the crème de la crème of the automotive penis prosthetic, ladies and gentlemen may I present to you The Hummer. Squared.

The first thought that comes into my mind is “how can somebody be stupid enough to think that’s a good idea?” For a moment I am genuinely confused, perhaps if we started an outreach program, maybe just sat down and talked with these people using little pamphlets and flow charts, explaining difficult words like “global warming” and “hung like tic-tac”? Much like the pregnancy centers that offer to help pregnant women make the choice to not abort the pregnancy, this insidious liberal re-education of car buyers could be big right?

And then I chuckle and I think to myself, “Ah who am I kidding? People are dumb as fucking rocks”

And I think back on yesterday in the supermarket with my mother, waiting behind the woman who held up the self-check out line because she kept trying to scan the coupons after each item instead of at the end. She would just cancel, and try swiping the item and the coupon, over and over.

On the way back to the car I tell my mother I think it was a bad idea on the supermarket’s part, to try and put in technology that hadn’t caught up with their customer’s (lack of) intelligence quiet yet. I half-expect an argument from my kind-hearted mother, sticking up for the woman, and my mother does start by telling me the technology is poorly designed.

But then she says, in the authoritative voice of a woman who works with developmentally challenged children, “Doing the same thing over and over again even though it’s not working, that’s behavior that is normally exhibited by a two-year old child.”

Oh zing, mom.
Zing.