DoubleDown on Resignation!: Product Reviews from the Sadness Industrial Complex

Kentucky Fried Chicken seems to be the high water-mark:  The flurry of cleverly-engineered chicken products within the last couple decades has been....thought-provoking, to say the very least.  They introduced "Chicken-fries", back in '97, but have been sheepishly pulling them off the menu every few years, as consumer taste oscillates between indignant (and purely aspirational) health-consciousness, and gluttonous self-loathing.  Although the process of extruding chicken-paste into parallelepiped "fries," rather than vaguely blobular "nuggets," bears distinction in neither cost nor ethics, it seems that the customer just takes issue with food flaunting its artificiality so proudly.  The Colonel's newest thing is rendering regular, non-extrusion-paste chicken pieces boneless, in a mysterious process on which  can find no information whatsoever.   Just kidding.  Obviously there was a full write-up on Huff Po. The upshot is that the process is neither particularly horrifying nor remotely interesting. Some dark part of me was hoping that they had started breeding boneless chickens, a la "Oryx & Crake," because that would be terrible enough to actually deliver in narrative terms, but no. I actually got way more chuckles from reading corporate's terms and

conditions for "Boneless Happy Hour."

HOW TO OBTAIN A FREE BONELESS PIECE:
..To obtain the Free Boneless Piece...consumers should say the password “I ate the bones” to request a Free Boneless Piece or otherwise request a Free Boneless Piece...Participating KFC restaurant manager reserves the right to deny Free Boneless Piece to any person he/she reasonably believes has already received a Free Boneless Piece or has engaged in any other fraudulent activity.

I can't help picturing a despondent Bernie Madoff being denied his boneless piece with a firm, "Take a hike, bozo."

I'm kinda bummed that I didn't know about the promotion back when it was a thing, because that's just the kind of disgusting shit that I'm totally not above eating.  Realistically, the existence of, let's call it, "experimental" fast food, hinges on the assumption that the end user is purchasing and eating the product in a state of suspended self-respect.  Of course the principle example of this is the KFC Famous Bowl, immortalized via Patton Oswalt rant.

The internal dialog of Oswalt's theoretical bowl-eater are speculative, but the assumption that he is consuming it alone is probably correct.  I don't have the numbers handy, but I would estimate that roughly 100% of fast food meals are consumed alone.  Can we just call it "The Sadness Industrial Complex"?  Or did we use that for Big Pharma already?

The circumstances in which one feeds themselves S.I.C. products are those of surrender; this is what happens when you're too unorganized, too exhausted, or too chronologically bankrupt to find the actual thing you want, and settle for something so much worse, that it's embarrassing.  Consequently, the qualities you value in an S.I.C. establishment are totally inverted from those that you would in a regular restaurant.  Ideally, it should look at least somewhat dingy and decidedly low-rent, such that your physical self looks better in relief.  And you want no one there, since being seen is unpleasant at best, and has potential for sever damage with respect to social capital; once again, I don't have the data here in front of me, but I'm willing to say with confidence that if someone sees you eating a DoubleDown, the chances that person will ever have sex with you is slightly less than 0%.

Anyway, the fact is that working in a shitty office park off the expressway has led me to eat more fast food than at any other point in my life: partially a function of my laziness interfering with at-home sandwich production, and partially because the break-room in my office park is possibly the only place in north Austin that is more depressing than the interior of a Wendy's. Here are a few of the more memorable food products that I put inside my body recently.


The "Big King"  
assembled By Burger King.

Those sneaky bastards.   After three decades spent ridiculing McDonald's infinitely sequential patty-bun-patty-bun routine, they quietly slipped a knock-off Big Mac on their own menu.  That's really the only thing that's interesting here.  It's just a Big Mac you buy at Burger King.  Is this, symbolically, as massively important as it seems?  How many angry conference calls came before this impostor showed up?  Did a B.K. exec jump to his death when this product was approved?  Did an analogous McDonald's VEEP, jump on his desk to perform victorious krumping when he heard the news?  Unfortunately, eating this burger answered none of these questions.

Flavor:              2/10
Presentation:   2/10
Digestibility:    3/10

The "Pretzel Bacon Cheeseburger" 
 assembled by Wendy's

Folks have gotten pretty burned out on this Pretzel Bread thing, but I totally understand why the major chains were trying to put the pretzel-treatment on absolutely everything.  Durability.  This shit is hard to deform, and consequently, this is the only fast food burger I've ever eaten that looked like the picture.  Even as a true garbage-eating adherent, I'm perplexed by the persistence bacon in fast food; the degradation of bacon starts immediately after it stops cooking, and the S.I.C. has yet to find a way around this; this bacon is exactly like any other fast food bacon: luke-warm, wet, and flavorless.   All that aside, the manufacturer's listing of caloric content is the most profound thing here.  680 calories for this hefty pile of pretzel, cheese, mayo and beef fat?   This seems...suspicious.  Do we verify these numbers? Is there an independent agency that has a mobile burger burning lab?  Fuck it. No one cares.

Flavor:              5/10
Presentation:   7/10
Digestibility:    2/10

The "Polish Sandwich"  assembled by Wienerschnitzel

Apparently this is a thing?  I first thought it was a physically-manifested Pollack joke, out of "Raising Arizona,"  but apparently this is  a product from a national franchise:  A single sliced Sausage, yellow mustard, a dill spear, both cheese and bread that appear to have been sourced from a bodega.  Polish Sandwich.    Really, I admire the simplicity here.  Although sausage itself is kind of a blackbox, there's something reassuring about getting a lunch that looks like it was simply slapped together by an absentminded parent. Here's why this is amazing.   Eating the number 9 breakfast at Micky D's leaves me with "McGriddle lipstick", a slick and persistent coating of some type of grease, and whatever syrup infusion has been chemically bonded to each little griddlecake discus.  Basically, the prospect of mysterious, synthetic poisons hidden within one's lunch isn't an entirely imagined concern, and the humble Polish Sandwich is much less anxiety inducing in this regard.  

Flavor:              4/10
Presentation:   1/10
Digestibility:    8/10

I guess I don't really have a point here.  Aside from public self-shaming.  Maybe the best hope for an improved diet is to document our worst meals as if they were our best.  

Down on the Salvage Lot

So I've been wasting a lot of film while picking parts.  Here are some, with one of my favorite passages from The Crying of Lot 49:

 "Yet at least he had believed in the cars. Maybe to excess: how could he not, seeing people poorer than him come in, Negro, Mexican, cracker, a parade seven days a week, bringing the most godawful of trade-ins: motorized, metal extensions of themselves, of their families and what their whole lives must be like, out there so naked for anybody, a stranger like himself, to look at, frame cockeyed, rusty underneath, fender repainted in a shade just off enough to depress the value, if not Mucho himself, inside smelling hopelessly of children, supermarket booze,two, sometimes three generations of cigarette smokers, or only of dust–– and

when the cars were swept out you had to look at the actual residue of these lives, and there was no way of telling what things had been truly refused 
(when so little he supposed came by that out of it had to be taken and kept) and what had simply (perhaps tragically) been lost: clipped coupons promising savings of 5 or 10 cents, trading stamps, pink flyers advertising specials at the markets, butts, tooth-shy combs, help-wanted ads, Yellow Pages torn from the phone book, rags of old underwear or dresses that already were period costumes,  

for wiping your own breath off the inside of a windshield with so you could see whatever it was, a movie, a woman or a car you coveted, a cop who might pull you over just for a drill all the bits and

pieces coated uniformly, like a salad of despair, in a gray dressing of ash, condensed exhaust, dust, body wastes—it made him sick to look, but he had to look. If it had been an outright junkyard, probably he could have stuck things out, made a career: the violence that had caused each wreck being infrequent enough, far enough away from him, to be miraculous, as each death, up till the moment of our own, is miraculous. But the endless rituals of the trade-in, week after week, never got as far as violence or blood, and so were too plausible for the impressionable Mucho to take for long. 

Even if enough exposure to the unvarying gray sickness had somehow managed to immunize him, he could still never accept the way each owner, each shadow, filed in only to exchange a dented, malfunctioning version of himself for another, just as futureless, automotive projection of somebody else’s life. As if it were the most natural thing. To Mucho it was horrible. Endless, convoluted incest."

Plastic Wheel Covers and False Beams: My Personal Demons

I guess everyone has their triggers.  Some folks really like animals or whatever--one of those abused pet commercials comes on--with the chewed-up tails, tattered ears, eyes blinded by cataracts, but somehow still able to broadcast a lifetime of abject, uninterrupted pain--and they totally lose it--and forget all about the totally awesome conversation we were just having about which Katy Perry music video is the very best.  (Incidentally, it's still "Teenage Dream.")

Me?  My soul is slowly being killed by plastic wheel covers.  

A compelling case to give up on life.

I'm serious.  There are a million things people point to in our day to day lives that, to them, signal the complete collapse of reason, triumph of ignorance, and the utter futility of trying to find meaning or hope in anything, ever--and for me it's this.  Which is distracting, because, you know, they're everywhere.

Really, this design solution, if you could call it that, is the clear victor in today's marketplace; the overwhelming majority of cars sold today wear hubcaps at least this embarrassing as they leave the lot, and most will keep wearing them until the whole machine is mercifully recycled in a few years time.   

My understanding is that most folks are at least vaguely aware that the cover itself is ornamental, so it seems odd that the specific design elements in common use are so readily accepted.  Let's take it apart:  the most ubiquitous design you'll see today is this: an sunburst of false spokes, arranged in a nauseating mockery of a mid-nineties alloy, with the cheap, stamped-steel wheel clearly visible behind, and let's not forget the fake lug bolts--which are really a nice touch considering the lug bolts are the one thing that probably should be covered--and the fact that the real ones are presumably at least partially viable behind the false ones for double-ugly.  Think of the decorative spokes as knives driven deep into your eye-sockets, and the decorative bolts as salt and lemon packed into the wounds, just to make sure that it all really hurts.  Some even have fake brake rotors peeking between the fake spokes, although thankfully, this has been confined to the lowest rung, dollar-tree, aftermarket segment and no actual auto-manufacturer (not even Hyundai) has engaged this particularly idiotic practice (as of yet).

Because, don't get me wrong, I'm not against facade being used here, so long as it reads and presents as facade.  We used to do this as a matter of course, and it looked great:  Partial wheel covers, veiling only the lug pattern and hub bearing, harmoniously nesting within the steel wheel, yielding a clean, simple look, while obfuscating none of the structure itself.  Steel-on-steel; easy to manufacture, easy to clean: an elegant, timeless, and straightforward execution.  

I think I'm wet.

Basically, the modern wheel cover is the automotive equivalent of the tuxedo T-shirt:  A two-dimensional, half-joking imitation of an altogether different and infinitely more beautiful and complex arrangement, but very unconvincingly so.  The one distinct difference here is that the tuxedo T-shirt has not been widely adopted as the go-to, non-ironic formal dress solution.  People don't get married in tuxedo T-shirts and then wonder aloud at the fact that any idiot would pay even a dime more for a "real" tuxedo, when--come on--they basically look exactly the same, right?  That's what I see on the road everyday.   People driving around earnestly wearing tuxedo T-shirts.  

When I bought my current car, it was wearing some pretty gross specimens, finished in that sparkly silver which looks nothing like any kind of metal.  When I was a few blocks away from the prior owner's house, I pulled over and pried them off with my fingers.  They looked new, so realistically, I probably could have listed them for like twenty bucks on ebay, but instead, I broke them all in half and threw them in a nearby dumpster.  I guess it was worth twenty bucks to know they would never be on a car ever again.  

Caddy sans covers?  Pretty badass, actually.

Usually, pulling the caps on a big domestic number leaves it looking like the most conspicuous candidate to be the neighborhood's source of angel-dust cut with fiberglass, but at least it's honest (honest regarding the structure of the wheel that is, I'm not saying I sell angel-dust cut with fiberglass.)  Anyway, what I am saying is that, since the true wheel on my particular Buick was never meant to be exposed, it doesn't look very nice, but inasmuch as this is the actual thing holding up the car, the wheel is as honest in expression as the multi-spokes on this Austin-Healey:

Oh, hell yes. 

And, yes, I do realize that I'm probably a little over-sensitive to false structure.

A lot of my job involves doing math to figure out where to hide real columns, so that an architect can put fake columns someplace that would never fucking have fucking columns in the first fucking place.  Fucking.   Considering that a typical wheel cover is just a polar array of anywhere from five to a dozen fake columns...well, it kind of makes sense that this bothers me more than it would most.

Of course, we're not just talking columns.  Generally speaking, absolutely anything you can point to in the built world that expresses something of its material reality, be it the surface finish, an "exposed beam" or strut--all of that expression is complete falsehood, and usually as blatantly contrary to physical truth  as these plastic hubcaps. 

Disgusting.

Here's something that's very popular right now: stone veneer.  Whether in the world of pseudo-luxury custom residential, commercial or even government, you'd be hard pressed to find a large scale project that doesn't use this finish somewhere.  And insofar as structural rationalism has been out of fashion for as-near-as-makes-no-difference a century, the stone is typically haphazardly applied in a way that bears no correlation to how stone could even theoretically be used to build something.  What I really love about the practice is this: the veneer--which itself is simply cosmetic affectation applied to make the building appear more permanent, makes it nearly impossible to properly water-proof the true structure behind, whether wood or steel.  So something that would otherwise last for hundreds of years with proper maintenance,  is all but guaranteed to require demolition in less than a single generation, just so that it might look like it will last for hundreds of years.  When I was much younger, I may have found some irony in this.

And don't get me started on faux-beams.  It gets so much worse, guys.

Fucking kill me.

This is basically how we build everything now.  We've finally found a way to create things that are catastrophically expensive, embarrassingly insubstantial, and so nonsensical to any real-world, material limitation, that trying to intuit the nuts and bolts of the physical world by simply looking around you would not even be a value-neutral exercise, but one that would actively mislead you--we build so dishonestly that trying to work out the logic of creation in reverse would be more likely to simply drive you insane than to actually teach you anything.

Anyway.  Happy new year, everybody.