Greetings from the Clown!

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Thursday at 11:42am, I need to get away for a moment. Busy day at work. My head is spinning from all of the projects that I am managing. I grab my purse, my copy of Chris Bohjallian’s “Trans-sister Radio” and I take to the streets. I like to read while eating, and I’m hungry. Anything but fast food. Fast food is not real food, in my opinion. Food should have nutritional value. Food should be cooked with natural fire, not radiation. And, perhaps most importantly, food should improve your health, not destroy it.

I just need a salad.

McDonalds is the closest place that sells salads. For the first time in years, I cross under the golden arches and enter what I can only describe as a bona fide circus. The lines are horrendous. Dirt is on the floor. A man in the corner is violently rocking in a seemingly severely autistic manner. And, I don’t see salads on the menu.

“You don’t have salads?” I’ve recently noticed that I tend to pose questions as if they’re statements: you don’t have salads. But, I digress. The man behind the counter with the shiny name badge answers, “yeah, but they aren’t on the menu.” He recites the three salad options. And, he seems irritated when I ask him what the ingredients in each are. “It’s just … salad,” he says flatly.

He rushes me. I pay. The register’s green display reads: AVG CUST SRVC TIME 46 SEC. I leave that counter and sit to eat my salad. Finished. When I stand up to empty my tray into the trash can, a uniformed woman who appears to be talking to herself approaches me. In a really strong regional accent, she counts the amount of garbage on everyone’s tray: 3 ga-biches…4 ga-biches…5 ga-biches. It’s so incredibly odd that I have to stop in my tracks. She continues to point around the restaurant and count: 34 ga-biches…35 ga-biches…36.” She takes my tray and I leave the restaurant, for the most part, unharmed. “This place is a circus,” I think to myself. “Maybe that’s why they have a clown as their mascot.”