I have a bone stuck in my craw. Trouble is, where the craw is eludes me. And the bone ain’t with you, but you are damn sure gonna listen. Do read on!
For the umpteenth time, I’ve been advised by the earth movers that pass as the intelligentsia of Madison Avenue, that I am dumb as dirt and too stupid to bother existing.
Let me ‘splain Lucy.
I recognize that I am from the cave-keeping days, when *gasp* one actually purchased an onion and cut it into dice (not with the numbers dummy), and cooked it. I didn’t get it out of the freezer section and measure out 1/2 cup into the pan. I realize that. But really. Just how lazy do you think I am?
You used to go to the grocery story and pick out some potatoes and proceed to buy them. Now they come in 5, 10 and 20 lb bags. If the recipe calls for 2 lbs of potatoes, I have no idea on the face of Pluto what that is. I have to run a few potatoes into the bathroom and throw them on the scales? I mean surely you jest!
I used to have the common sense of a cow so it was assumed that I could manage to figure out how many carrots I needed when I shopped. Then some bright farmer decided to bundle them into a new thing called a “bunch”. Maybe you know how many carrots are in a bunch, but my scale is busy weighing potatoes and I don’t have time to count them. Is is a dozen? Or a pound? DO YOU KNOW? — I thought not.
Speaking of dozen, who the hell decided that I wanted eggs by the twelve, or by the eighteen? Nobody asked me. I checked my diaries since the age of sixteen, and there are no references to being asked about this.
Whose the numbers guy who decided all this stuff? It’s harder and harder to be allowed to purchase four turnips you know. They put them in fives and cover them with plastic wrap. Like I can’t get through that crap? They put my grapes in a ziplock bag, and I just this morning, in full view of every other shopper and God herself, opened it and extracted a whole bunch and laid them gently on the display, zipping up my lighter bag and marching off. No alarms, and no police followed me home.
Apparently it’s not okay to put mayo on my hamburger bun (when I choose to have lettuce on my burger) and then draw a smiley face with mustard. No I must BUY some pre-mixed concoction called Djo-nnaise, where somebody way smarter than I has figured out what the perfect ratio of mayo to mustard is. How the hell I have ever mixed the dressing of you-guessed it, mayo-mustard for my to-die-for potato salad is beyond me and the Muses.
I can’t be trusted around cheese either. I’m offered all manner of grated cheese in every flavor, and sometimes mixed together in “premium” offerings. It would be horrifying and would no doubt ruin the dish should I get three shreds more of cheddar than Monterey Jack in my own eyeballing method of shredding.
Oh I know, there is someone even older than I who is crying about how they used to make their own catsup and dill pickles and so on, and so forth, but I’m not trying to be difficult here. Those are reasonable to find ready done at the store. “Mexican blend” is, well just an East Coast innovation to help Brooklynites THINK they are eating some authentic “Mexican” when of course any fool knows that there is actually Mexican cheese that is actually authentic.
Well, I saw a new one the other day, and you may have seen it too. Now Land-o-Lakes wants me to buy their butter in honking chunks with seasonings already in it, so you don’t have to actually buy any herbs or spices, but you can just melt them into your pan and throw your piece of steroid rich chicken breast on top where it will meld into the flesh, seared there until the planet is incinerated in its last gasp before being swallowed by Mother Sun in an incestuous firestorm of eating one’s own.
See, it really is not so much that they think that I’m incapable of deciding on which herbs and spices I want on my skinny chicken flesh. It’s not that, though I can appreciate their snooty, nose in the stratosphere unbelievably gaudy display of wretched excess. No it’s not that. It’s the fact that they think that I am so unthinkingly stupid that I will actually pay them to tell me that I am this stupid that I need their in-your-face slap at my self-esteem.
For this is the bottom line here folks. For all this “time-saving” help they want me to pay a premium price! Here stupid, buy this and pay through the nose too! I mean that is so many insults heaped upon one person, that they should weigh more than enough to sink through the planet and plop out the other side faster than any of those sub-atomic particles that allegedly sling through my body every second without so much as a howdy do or excuse me!
I mean I can take the MENSA application test if I want to be insulted. I can nod dumbly as a nuclear physicist patiently explains the wherefores of string theory if I want to feel OUT OF MY MIND STUPID. I can make a list of stuff like this a mile long that would make me feel light in the neuron-possessing academy.
I don’t need no idiot at Land-o-it’s-butter-for-christsakes-Lakes telling me they know what herb to put on my freakin’ chicken!
So stuff it in your advertisement portfolio and budget and sit on it and twirl!
I feel better now.
Existential Ennui 