Chipotle, KFC, And The Department Of Homeland Security

If, like me, you happen to live in the United States, you know that this week is pretty much a waste of time as far as getting anything productive done. This is because Thursday is Thanksgiving, that magical time of year during which we give thanks for all that we are blessed with by gorging on food until we’re swollen and bloated like ticks on a dog. I’m not quite sure how we went from thankful to gluttonous, but I’m pretty sure that our emaciated and smallpocked forbears would be puzzled by our behavior. “I’m thankful that only half of my children starved to death this year, but yeah, eating until you sweat gravy really captures the spirit of things.”

Once I witnessed two grown adults solemnly discussing the best way to build a mashed potato moat so that the gravy was contained properly and unable to mix with any unauthorized foodstuffs. And because I’m a typical American, I thought to myself, “Wow! That’s a great idea!” I soon found myself building great architectural works at the dinner table, proudly pouring gravy into a culinary version of the great Roman aqueducts.

After dinner, someone broke out a bottle of Goldschlager which pretty much summed up how ridiculous Americans can be when we put our minds to it. “How was my Thanksgiving? It was great! I ate a 7,200 calorie meal, drank some gold, and later on that night wiped my ass with a bar of platinum because these are the Good Times, and they will never come to an end!” And of course, everyone will have a good laugh at this in five years after the Microsoft Hunter-Killer Bots have us all living in dank caves, fighting over who gets to feast on Mr. Fatass’s succulent haunches.

So not a lot gets done this week, because we already get Thursday and Friday off, and Wednesday nobody really does anything, so you might as well take that off as well. And hell, that makes this a two day workweek, and you can’t really get anything done in a two day workweek, so you just sit there at your desk, shooting the shit and mentally undressing your coworkers, counting down the hours until you’re using a pry bar to cram a little more turkey in before you move on to dessert.

And this blog is no exception to the half-assing rules, so there will be 0% rhyme or reason to any of this nonsense.

See?

Case in point: Chipotle. I was perusing the non-Portugeuse fetish porn part of the internet the other day (it happens), when I stumbled across an article entitled, “10 Things Chipotle Won’t Tell You“. Don’t bother clicking that link, by the way. The article is full of boring Wall Street bullshit that gives raging boners to people who run hedge funds, but the rest of humanity could give a flying fuck.

I thought it would be a lot more entertaining, and was running over likely possibilities for what those ten things might be, like “Steak burritos contain 10% orphan feet,” or, “Chipotle is owned and operated by NAMBLA.” For the benefit of enraged Chipotle lawyers who are at this moment spitting guacamole and toe rings at their monitors, I should point out that these things are absolutely, 100% not true, just examples of what I was hoping for when I clicked on the link for the article.

The funny thing is, I’ve met plenty of Chipotle junkies, and while orphan feet burritos might give them pause, Chipotle could just offer free guacamole and they’d go right back to eating it. “Did you know that Chipotle offers an off-menu burrito that is all orphan feet? Delicious!”

I personally don’t get the whole Chipotle thing. It’s nothing more than well presented fast food, which I must admit does count for something. You go to the opposite end of the spectrum and you have the KFC Bowls which is to fine cuisine what explosive diarrhea is to gas station restrooms. The attitude seems to be, “Look, it’s all going to wind up clogging up your shit-pipe anyway, so stop fucking around and cram it in your goddamn gullet, would you?” That’s the actual sales-pitch. You walk up to the counter, and they hit you with that. If you refuse to buy The Bowl, two guys named Roy come out of the back and beat you in the kidneys with pool cues until you piss blood. KFC is a weird place.

Profoundly weird.

Which reminds me that once I applied for a job at KFC. I was 16 years old and my girlfriend had been nagging me to get a job because in her opinion I wasn’t spending enough money on her. She didn’t come right out and say that, of course. What she said was, “You know, Audra’s boyfriend took her out to eat at a fancy French restaurant,” in such a way as to let me know that if I ever wanted to risk teenage pregnancy with her in the back of a station wagon again, I would get my lazy, goldbricking ass a job.

This was a problem, though. Between school, playing soccer, and listening to Led Zeppelin, I didn’t feel that I had time for a job, which in a worst-case scenario might cause me to have to wake up before 2:00 PM on a weekend. But still, the prospect of not getting laid was equally unsettling, so I bravely marched right into our town’s KFC and asked for an application, which I promptly filled out with every misspelling known to mankind. I even managed to spell my name wrong. And to make sure that I didn’t get the job, I put someone else’s phone number on it instead of my own. And then I “cashed in” on the resulting good will with my girlfriend.

The next Monday in school, a classmate that I hardly ever talked to approached me. “Hey, I saw that you applied for a job at KFC.”

“Oh, yeah, you work there, don’t you?”

“Yeah. I tell you though, the boss wasn’t really impressed. You spelled a LOT of stuff wrong on your application. But I put in a good word for you, so I think he might consider hiring you.”

“What? You asshole! Call him up and take it all back! You tell him that if he hires me, I will dip my balls in every single container of coleslaw that I get my hands on. Tell him that I steal a lot and am an asymptomatic carrier of typhoid fever. I want you to tell him that I am covered in active sores and lesions, and if I am hired that I will punch every third customer in the balls, you got that?”

“WHAT?”

“For fuck’s sake, man, I only applied for the job to get laid!”

I’m sure that confused him quite a bit, and I like to think of him going home that night and lying awake in bed trying to figure out what angle he missed that would have resulted in him getting laid just for applying for work at KFC.

Maybe I could get a handjob if I applied for a job at Walmart…

Some coworkers and I were discussing the Department of Homeland Security today, specifically what it is that the Department of Homeland Security is supposed to do. The DHS was formed in the wake of September 11, when it became apparent that some scary looking guys in bathrobes were actually serious about their whole “Death to America” schtick. They had beards, their women wore what appeared to be large tents, and they had a way with box cutters, so we formed the Department of Homeland Security to help keep us safe. I get that, and I have no problem with it. Sure, sometimes you might find yourself in the airport wondering why, exactly, the DHS needs to go two knuckles deep into your butthole to protect the country, but clearly the enemy is clever, and if the DHS thinks you’ve got nail clippers in your anal cavity, well that’s a small price to pay for freedom.

But what happened next is that the Department of Homeland Security found themselves with essentially a blank check issued by Uncle Sam. Think about the number you would write on a check like that. You’d basically figure out a number so large and ridiculous that no one would believe that it wasn’t a joke, cut it in half and then try to cash it. The DHS didn’t even try to cut it in half. Their budget for next year alone is $60 billion, which is all kinds of crazy when you realize that it was formed to fight an enemy that is just now mastering the art of goat to goat combat.

I love the smell of goat fights in the morning…

And once a government agency has $60 billion on its hands, it needs to find something to do with it. Like raid flea markets. Or bust people for watching movies. Or making sure that Miley Cyrus gets a cut off of all CD sales, lest the country go down the fucking toilet. At the rate we’re going, the DHS will be put in charge of enforcing good taste on the internet, and then we’ll all be… HEY! HEY LET GO OF ME, DAMMIT! I HAVEN’T DONE ANYTHING WRONG!!! AAAAAUUUUUGGGGGHHHHH!

I think the main problem lies with the name of the agency. The Department of Homeland Security is way too broad and open to misinterpretation. That leaves the door open for any and every DHS official to come up with some far-fetched but conceivable way in which the country could be harmed and then throw a lot of guys with guns at the problem. “People don’t like beets. And when people have to eat something they don’t like, they’re unhappy. And when they’re unhappy, they aren’t as productive as they could be. And when people are less productive, the US economy suffers. And when the US economy suffers, the country has to cut back on important programs such as the Give Homeland Security A Metric Fuckton of Money program. WE NEED TO PROTECT THE COUNTRY FROM BEETS!” And just like that, your Aunt Gladys is lying on the floor amidst the shattered remains of her pickled beets, the jackboot of the state pressed firmly into her neck.

But if we had a much more targeted name for the DHS, they’d focus on the task at hand and leave us honest citizens alone. I propose the name, The Department of Killing Foreigners. That’s short, to the point, and is psychologically way more effective than the name we currently use.

Mullah Omar: In order to strike at the Great Satan, we must first evade the Department of Homeland Security.

Ahmed: Hey! That sounds like fun!

Compare this to the proposed name:

Mullah Omar: In order to strike at the Great Satan, we must first evade the Department of Killing Foreigners.

Ahmed: Wait, the what?

Mullah Omar: Reports indicate that the Mexican border is lightly guarded in places…

Ahmed: Di you say the Department of Killing Foreigners?!?

Mullah Omar: Yes.

Ahmed: You know, I’ve got a pretty good life right now. I have two goats, and a third on layaway, and I just bought my wife a new tent. I’m not sure I want to be messing with a technologically advanced group of people with unlimited funding whose stated purpose is to kill me.

Mullah Omar: Glory be to the martyrs in their struggle against…

Ahmed: Yeah, yeah, yeah, that’s great. Listen, I’m gonna go home and look for infidels around the house. If I see any, I’ll uhh, I’ll let you know.

Mullah Omar: Wait! Wait! All prospective martyrs get a free KFC Bowl! Wait! Come back!

I would not fuck with the Department of Killing Foreigners, and I’m willing to bet that very few people would be, especially if we went out and got ourselves a certifiably batshit crazy motherfucker of a guy to run it.

And then, just to make sure that no one fucked with us, we’d put someone dangerously irresponsible and totally reckless in at the number two slot: Andy Dick.

In no time, the Department of Killing Foreigners would invade Vancouver, demanding waffles and heroin, and once the rest of the world saw how we treat our allies, no one, and I mean no one, would ever fuck with us again, and we could all settle down for a nice gravy moat and orphan foot dinner, secure in the knowledge that we are forever safe from our enemies, if not from ourselves.