First, dear worst-reader, why is jet-lag when traveling from west to east the worst? Is it because of the strange “-1” designation on my travel itinerary? PHL > FRA on Monday afternoon but you arrive in the wee-hours on Tuesday morn at destination. I think I crossed six time zones. I’ve been doing it for twenty-plus years. There is no getting used to it. Yet when I go the other direction the lag is never so bad. The Mayo Clinic provides a bit of knowledge on the subject. For example, I didn’t know that you need one day of recovery for every time-zone you pass through. Nomatter. What the doctors and scientists forget to mention in their study is the fact that worst-writer has made a grave error in his life of travel and boredom. That means my body rejects the west to east travel mode. My body yearns and lusts after the opposite. But we are all condemned to our fate, right, dear worst-reader? Yes. There is fate. She is a bitch. And she becomes mounted and secured in your life when you do her wrong. Jet-lag is indeed like a life that sucks or a wife that doesn’t. Nuff.
Three pics in this post today, dear worst-reader. Pics that all have to do with the worst-subject at hand. I just got back from a month-long stay in my grand united mistakes of American’t. I can’t tell you how much I already miss her. Her smells. He tastes. Her ignorance. Ah! Ignorance. A pungent taste that one is. It’s like when you first smoke. Nasty. But once you get used to it, the sensation of inhaling enthrals. Don’t it? That small gesture of sucking on a fag and pulling him beyond the gag reflex. It is nice once you get used to it. It’s the kicker that you need. Inhaling. At least that’s the way it was when I smoked. But it was the taste of the cigarette that finally gets you. Right? At certain moments in life nothing can match the taste of a Marlboro. Not even the rawness of Red Man or a pinch of Copenhagen can match it. Btw, you wanna quite smoking? Just put a little pinch of tobacco between cheek & gum. It sure helped me. Move on.
Back to the pics.
The first pic (above) I took while visiting the American dream that you can buy for a discounted $75 per person. We got Busch Gardens tickets with %25 off. Lucky, eh. It was the third time I visited the park with my son but I’ve been there numerous times in the past thirty years. This was probably the last for me, though. Indeed. It’s time to stop riding roller coasters. I’m fifty now and flabby and getting old and I can’t (don’t want to) take the jostling, the bumps, the twists and the g-forces of those über-fun rides. It’s really enough now. I’ll also miss the bonding with my sixteen year old. He loves the rides as much as I did. And. Boy! The park has changed. For one, it’s no longer owned by a beer maker. It’s now owned by a company that traps orcas in order to train them to live in a pool and hopefully not kill their trainers. It hasn’t changed in the way it looks though. But then again, America hasn’t changed much in that respect either. You have to get close to it to see the changes–to see the drama of the change. Yes. Like the service industry driven country slash nation-state that America is now. Remember that change? Well, maybe you don’t remember that change because, well, because things didn’t go well with the change. For you see, America has become a service country not by choice but instead by coercion. And. As with most things coerced, the change has gone horribly wrong.
Now that American production has taken a back seat to the so-called service industry over the past thirty years, you would think that the rewards of having so brilliantly made such a change would shine bright. Dullness is proving its value now, isn’t it? And a place like Busch Gardens is indeed a mecca for those who still believe in The Dream that used to be industrial America. Just pay what you need to pay upon entrance and you will be serviced to the hilt with rainbows, purple unicorns, the luscious lie of family that is nothing more than an entity waiting for you to break it and, of course, wait for the entertainment to overwhelm and whisk who and what you are away for a least a few hours. For real. Ain’t it great what the American service industry can do? Go to an entertainment park, a theme park, roller coaster heaven and you will be shown that there is no facade and never has been.
Some between-thoughts and interjections about the demise of home.
- I had to fill a bike tire with air during my recent USA visit. Luckily a gas station was nearby so I drove the bike there. Wow. Air cost money now. In fact, it cost seventy-five cents to put air in the tire of my bike. Why is it that I know, ever since becoming an expat twenty years ago, that gas stations have to resort to charging for air for bicyclists? Oh yeah, I know that because I haven’t had to fill a bike tire from a gas station in that long! It’s good to be reminded of change.
- The last time I was at a cinema in the US they charged me extra for butter in my popcorn. The service-person at the country even frowned when I requested that she fill half the bag with popcorn, butter it, and then do the same with the other half. She was very confused if my request meant that I was getting extra butter twice.
- There are now separate fast-lanes at amusement parks where customers can purchase a pass in order to get ahead of the crowd when boarding roller coasters and thereby avoid the longs lines. This is a way the greed mongers allow those with a little extra cash to get ahead of the crowd. Btw, the same applies to the huge parking lot of the park. Only if you pay extra for parking can you park near the front entrance. Otherwise you must take a hot and steamy bus to get to that entrance.
With the above examples in mind, let’s look at a few other ways that the greed-mongers will be able milk you in the future. For. Indeed. As American’t continues down its fail-upward path of putting the middle-class in its place–which it so deserves because only the middle class could politically chose the politics of its own demise–there are still endless ways to milk those who need to be milked and/or create much needed revenue streams to further the rich’s desire for the non-rich to remain stagnant and poor.
- Restaurants will start charging for amenities at your table e.g. salt & pepper, bread & butter, knives and forks and spoons, napkins, etc.
- How ’bout a few cents more for ice in your drink.
- You’ll have to start paying extra for the paper that your professor gives his tests on and don’t forget the extra charge for the ink he uses when grading your papers.
- Wal-Mart will charge you to use their shopping carts; they will also charge extra if they have to open another register because the lines are too long.
- When buying roses you must pay extra if you want the leaves to stay on.
- Wanna watch Netflix via your ISP? Just add another ten bucks to your monthly ISP bill, ditto for iTunes downloads.
- When flying you must pay extra for wearing two shoes, to have a tray in front of you, to turn on your seat light, to have a stewardess come see you, to eat the wonderful meals they prepare and, last but not least, to travel with luggage…
Hold on there, skippy. That last one. The bullet-point about the luggage? That’s already happening–especially with most US carriers. And if you want to know how airlines get away with what they do to customers, all you have to do is look at what America has done to itself by continuing to elect conservatives. But I suppose you get my drift without me imposing all my political worst-views at you, eh dear worst-reader. Still. America has literally gone to shit in a hand basket (unless you can pay so that you don’t have to carry the basket) and after spending a month there it’s easy to tell why and how this has happened. From watching TV to listening to one of those robo-calls my mother gets a dozen times a day. It’s unbelievable what is tolerated in a society who has replaced all meaning, belief and faith, culture and merit with $$$. $$$ = everything! And. A simple day outing to bond with my son on a few roller coaster rides revealed yet another angle of the true face of what’s become(ing) of my beloved American’t. Indeed. This is what happens when everything becomes a commodity. And before I forget. The second pic (above) is a postcard my mother received in her mailbox. It has my mother’s (correctly written) first name printed on it to make it look like someone wrote it by hand. It declares my mother’s house “ugly” and thinks she shouldn’t fix it but instead sell it. Wow, eh. With stuff like this going on there really is some truth to the idear that not only the American apple barrel is rotten but because there’s nothing left in it everybody who can is still trying to scrape scraps from it. Which brings me to pic #3 of this post.
While scanning the channels the night before I was due to return to Eurowasteland, I came across the movie They Live. How appropriate. A movie, not unlike the movie Dawn of the Dead–the one where most of the story takes place in a shopping mall, which is a symbol for the consumption that is turning people into zombies–They Live is about what happens to a country that allows itself to be enslaved. But that’s neither here nor there, eh American’t? It’s always good to see my childhood favourite wrastler Roddy Piper. Indeed, dear worst-reader. A wrastler tells the story of the demise of America. We are now officially a country where FAKE rules.
And before I return to my worst-daily routine of dreaming about being a writer. Here a clip from the Interwebnets where Bill Maher taps into my thoughts. Or is it I tapping into his? Nomatter.
Rant on.
-Tommi
worstwriter 